


History Repeating

by josephides



Category: Alpha and Omega - Patricia Briggs, Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: F/M, Google only gets you so far, Historical Inaccuracy, Marriage is work, Werewolf marriage is even more work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:00:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 42,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28193595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josephides/pseuds/josephides
Summary: Bran leaned forwards and touched his finger to her chin, tilting her head. “Say the words, Leah. Say you’ll have me.”She didn’t know why it was important to him but she nodded again. “I’ll have you, Bran Cornick,” she said. The wolf inside her, a mostly quiet beast, seemed to stand to attention as if Leah was making a promise.Bran, too, suddenly looked serious. “And I shall have you.”
Relationships: Bran Cornick/Leah Cornick
Comments: 21
Kudos: 131





	History Repeating

**Author's Note:**

> I really tried hard to finish this in time for Christmas, thus there may be more typos than usual. Also, I've had two glasses of wine. HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

The house itself was small, no more than two rooms. But it was hers, and no one else’s, so Leah was perfectly satisfied. She made new bed-curtains to keep out the draft around the bed, cut wildflowers for her table, maintained her fire, looked after her motley collection of livestock, preserved and cooked and cleaned and kept herself to herself.

It was peaceful. After years of pack-life, at the mercy of her violent Alpha and his predatory men, waking up in her own bed knowing she was safe was something she wondered if she would ever get used to. Her heart still raced the moment she opened her eyes but after a minute it would calm again. _Safe_ , she would tell herself. _Safe._

Sometimes the Marrok would send someone by with freshly chopped firewood, perhaps a hare or two, some smoked meat and she’d be polite, make conversation and offer them a drink. But she wouldn’t invite them inside.

They were curious of her. Natural enough, she supposed. There had been a woman before her, the Marrok’s mate in truth. She knew – because Bran had told her – Leah was nothing like her. A Native woman, by all accounts. Kind and sweet, a Shaman’s daughter with magic of her own. Leah was nothing of the kind. A werewolf only and no one had ever called her kind.

Bran himself came for a meal once a month, part of their bargain. The bond needed close contact. Leah had been responsible for cooking in her old pack – most of the females had been but she was the one who had real flair. She had arrived to this territory in Spring, found wild garlic in these mountains, mallow and asparagus, a veritable bounty of flavors. 

So she served him venison stew and vegetables, with fresh crusty bread and butter she had churned herself from the goats he had given her. He ate like a starving man but the glint in his eye was softer, she thought, then when they had first met.

“It’s working then?”

Bran nodded, mopped up the juices with a chunk of bread. “Yes. It’s better. Thank you,” he added.

Leah shrugged. She had little to do with it. The bond lay mutely between them, an intangible thing. What he did with it to control the beast inside of him was his business. She cared not. She had all she needed.

He licked his thumb and sat back. “I hold a pack meeting every two weeks. Will you join it?”

“In what capacity?” Their agreement had been that she would be his mate in name only. She did not want the burden of a pack and Leah knew she had no capacity for leadership. She was – as had been pointed out to her time and time again – eminently selfish. _She_ thought so long as everyone was clear on that, if they expected nothing of her, she would harm no one by being so.

Bran tilted his head to the side and considered her. “A member of my pack, of course. For you are,” he added.

That was true. She had taken his flesh. 

“And what things do you discuss at these meetings?” Leah asked, taking his bowl away and returning with the dish of huckleberries she had picked earlier, knowing he was coming by. They were his favorites. Like her, the Marrok had a sweet tooth.

Bran smiled, whether at her question or the fruit, she didn’t know. “This and that. It’s companionable. You might like that.”

By which she assumed he was implying she was lonely. She wasn’t. Leah hadn’t been ‘alone’ since she had been Changed. She didn’t want, or need, companionship.

“It’s just a suggestion,” he said, shrugging.

Leah felt his disapproval and she did not like it. He was a stranger but he was her Alpha, though he tried not to force it on her. “I shall think on it.”

The rest of the meal was spent in comfortable silence. 

*

The parlor in Bran’s house stank of unwashed bodies and damp wolf pelt. _Men_ , Leah thought, gritting her teeth. There were a baker’s dozen of them, all milling about near the big fireplace, their monsters contained in their human prisons. There was also a handful of human women, women with whom Leah had just nodding acquaintance from church and the general store. They were clustered together, clearly all on friendly terms.

Leah was the only female werewolf. She belonged to neither the male cluster or the female. She would have to make her own place.

Around the large room was an eclectic mix of wooden chairs. She chose one that looked a little sturdier than the others, the bones of her werewolf body denser than she appeared, and waited for something to happen.

Bran had not yet extended the pack bonds to her but she had noticed already that she could tell when he was close. That, she supposed, was the mating bond which she knew he controlled, reducing the ebb and flow between them so it wouldn’t bother her. This one gift seemed to have slipped him by – but it was no bother. She actually found it useful. She sensed him, she saw, before the others did.

Suddenly there was a rush to get chairs, to place them around the room. Wives sat with husbands, sometimes on laps, sometimes on the daintier chairs, obedient and meek.

Bran walked in the room, smiling at something his eldest son had said. A little Native boy, perhaps ten, scrambled behind. This was the other child, the one Bran’s true mate had died bearing. A miracle.

To her surprise, the child turned to look at her directly, seeking her out in the crowd. She flinched and quickly looked away. When she had been human, Leah had borne her own children and keenly mourned their loss when she outlived them; she needed no more reminders of that.

The meeting began. And, in truth, it was similar to many such meetings Leah had attended in her life. There were disputes to be discussed and put to rest, plans for upcoming hunts, work that needed doing. Once this was agreed, Bran talked a little about his work further afield. Of packs beyond their territory. His remit was stretching beyond the west now.

Bran Cornick was an astonishingly good orator, Leah thought with surprise. Captivating. With the fire at his back, standing in front of his pack, he seemed to glow with vigor and magical energy, there were glints of gold in his hair and in his eyes. When she had first met him, she had been struck by his height – taller than her, always a relief – and by his pretty-colored eyes. His power had been muted, then, something he did to put people at ease. Now, he let it go, let his power lick at them all.

 _Marrok_. That was what they called him. A reference to a story, she understood. She was not well read. Most women weren’t.

It was a heady experience, being in that parlor with him and all these men. Leah wished she could open the door, get a trickle of cool air. Quite a few of the women were fanning themselves with their hands and Leah felt the same. Hot, her bodice was constricting her, her breasts felt heavy and sensitive within. Her dense hair, which she had braided and twisted into a knot at the top of her head like always, felt tight and constricting. She wanted to let it down, to feel it tickle her bare skin.

The tips of her fingers tingled.

 _Ah_ , she thought. He was calling their wolves. She had not realized these meetings ended with a run.

She wished she had known. She had not dressed for public Changing. Normally she would leave off her shift and stays for such occasions. Clothes had a tendency to be damaged, no matter how carefully Leah might hang the items from a tree branch or such. And no matter how many times she did it, leaving one’s undergarments out for strange men to see still left her a little uncomfortable.

As the meeting ended and the werewolves made for the door with palpable eagerness, Leah remained on her chair, uncomfortably unsure. She didn’t need to Change. She could simply go home. The few times she had Changed since she had arrived in Aspen Creek she had done so from the comfort her own chamber and not run too far from her hearth.

She had missed a pack run, however. She chewed her lip.

Bran made his way to her and she looked up, meeting his eyes. For she could – unlike everyone here, she was now, technically, his equal.

“I did not consider,” he began. Then he stopped and firmed his mouth. “If you would like, you could Change in the house? I will wait for you.”

This was a thoughtful offer. Leah nodded. “I would be grateful.”

He nodded and said something to his sons in his native tongue, then escorted her from the public rooms of his house to the private.

“My sons’ rooms,” he murmured, nodding to two doors before opening another. “And this is mine. You can Change in here.”

The layout of the house was quite clever, with the three chambers around the second hearth. Whilst werewolves were very warm-blooded, she knew winters here could get very cold indeed.

His chamber was a little untidy. The bed had not been made and he had left a shirt on the floor. And there were _books_ everywhere. She had not seen so many books in her life. She bent to pick the shirt up automatically, then realized she had no such responsibility. She quickly folded it and placed it on the truck at the base of his bed.

Bran watched her do this, his keen eyes following her every movement. “I’ll leave you. Let me know when you are ready.”

He closed the door.

Undressing in a strange man’s bedchamber was a novelty. She unlaced her boots, undid the buttons of her simple wool dress, slipped this from her shoulders and then stepped out of it. Her stays came next and then her shift and petticoat and wool stockings. She folded these quickly next to where she had placed his shirt.

Leah’s Change always came easily to her. Easier still, she thought, now that she was mated to such a man.

She whined at the door when she wanted to be let out and Bran opened it.

His smile down at her was full and unconstrained. He stroked his hand over her head and muzzle. “Hello, beautiful,” he crooned.

Leah preened. She had never seen herself in full, only glimpses of her reflection in pools of moonlit water. She knew she was not a normal gray wolf but something lighter, tawny in color. She liked that he thought her wolf was beautiful.

“Wait for me?” her Alpha asked, scratching her between the ears, making her leg thump with pleasure.

She nodded and went to sit in front of the hearth between the rooms. Outside she could hear the howls and grunts of the rest of the pack. Sensibly, the women had sequestered themselves in the parlor and closed the heavy door. They would talk and sew, together, Leah imagined. Speak of their men and what children there were. Gossip. She had been a woman like them, once. She almost missed it.

Bran trotted out in a few moments, it seemed. Now he _was_ a gray wolf and small too, with a charming white tipped tail. She found herself grinning, or as close to it as she could, her tongue lolling from her mouth. _I know,_ he said to her, sounding amused. 

Leah tilted her head to the side, wondering at this facility for him to talk to her mind-to-mind. Her Alpha had not had it.

 _I can only speak_ **to** _you,_ he told her, coming forward and nuzzling her, rubbing his face against her _s,_ marking her with his scent. _I cannot hear you. Fair warning._

She nodded and jumped up, followed him from the house.

Back east, Leah’s pack had roamed plains of rolling country, with forests of oaks that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was mostly flat land, however, and this new territory that she called home was mountainous and rocky, smothered in firs, patches of damp earth that had once been snow, with the scent of unfamiliar wildlife everywhere. She kept close to Bran, or he kept close to her, showing her the way.

And there clearly was a way. She could see tracks of wolf prints, well trod into the earth as they ascended up a peak, chasing down deer. Leah loved to run but forced herself to hold back. These were not her people, not truly, not ever perhaps, and though she itched to be free, to join in the hunt, her wolf didn’t usually trust easily. It was why Bran had been such a surprise to her. Her wolf had all but rolled over when they had first met.

The first kill made was offered to Bran, as was proper. Then Bran jerked his head to her, bringing her forward, too. Of course, she was his mate. She, too, ate first now.

She took a polite mouthful of fresh meat - again, holding back the urge to feast, a truly almost uncontrollable instinct – and then skittered to the side, licking her muzzle. As other wolves passed her, curious noses whuffed at her flank, her belly, her throat. She noted that his son, the elder Samuel, who was a white wolf and truly striking, avoided her, as did the younger son. She dismissed it. What did she care what they thought of her?

After eating, many of the wolves curled up together to sleep. A few returned home. Samuel and Charles ran off and could be heard play fighting, the older teaching the younger.

 _Come_ , Bran said to her. _Let’s run._

He took her down to a creek, perhaps the one after which his town was named, and alongside it was a stretch of flat land. Finally, finally Leah was free to run unconstrained and she did so, Bran at her side, racing together through the dark, bumping sides, circling, _playing_. For she could play with him. He was her mate, no threat to her.

At last, she thought.

*

When they had agreed the mating bargain, it had been in platonic terms. She had not heard of such a thing but Bran assured her it was possible. Unusual, he admitted, but possible and it was what he desired above all.

It was something he had clearly thought of. He had explained to her that he did not want to marry or love again. “My wolf… or I, perhaps, could not take another loss like that.”

Later, Leah had heard from others how he had been after his true mate died. How he had first tried to isolate himself up on the big house but even then the quakes of his grief-filled-rage had shaken the town, filled his pack with the daily fear that they would wake to see his amber eyes over them and then it would be over. How he had then taken himself off with his eldest son, travelling for years, seeking peace and, finally, a new mate.

In the months she had lived in Aspen Creek, she had only seen moments of that rage. His pack was filled with the kinds of monsters most Alphas would turn away – old creatures whose minds were perhaps not as intact as they may have once been. Sometimes they slipped and he was forced to punish them. His anger was a cold thing. It made her quake, too, though she had yet to suffer his wrath. She hoped she never would.

Her first real winter, Leah slept deeply under piles of blankets, the heat from her hearth warming the air, bedcurtains drawn close. In this cocoon, her little house surrounded by banked snow, it was quiet but for the occasional hoot of an owl, the rustle of a hungry predator braving the werewolf territory for a morsel to eat.

The hurrying footsteps of a two-legged creature was almost preposterously loud. She emerged from her cocoon.

“Who’s there?” she called, alarm spiking.

“It’s me, ma’am,” Colin Taggart replied. “The Marrok has need of you.”

Leah pulled on clothes, draped in front of the fire to be toasty warm for the morning. Wool stockings, her thickest petticoats. Her sturdy boots. She wrapped shawls around herself. She opened the door to a wave of cold air and blood. Not Tag’s.

“What’s happened?” Last she had heard, the Marrok was on the way back from a neighboring pack. Some problem with vampires. Around here, it was always vampires. 

“There was an attack on the road. He’s been wounded.”

Though for the life of her she couldn’t see how she would be useful at a time like this – any techniques she may have once applied on her children when they were wounded were next to useless for werewolves – she allowed Tag to propel her through the forest up to the Marrok’s house.

Despite the hour, people were milling around outside. Samuel and Charles included.

“Tag, this isn’t a good idea,” Samuel growled, blocking their path.

Like Tag, he was covered in blood as well. She looked at the darkened house in confusion. “Where is he? Why are you out here?” she asked. Her eyes met the wide and fearful gaze of the boy, Charles, and part of her wanted to comfort him. She ceased that train of thought quickly. He was not her responsibility.

“The Marrok needs his mate, Samuel,” Tag said, eyes lowered to the more dominant wolf.

“He’ll kill her.”

Leah jerked. Tag was still holding her arm, gripping the muscled meat above her elbow tightly. “I beg your pardon?” she demanded.

Then she heard it. A low, threatening growl from within the house.

Around them, the pack shivered as one.

“You should send them all away, Sam,” Charles whispered. “It’s not safe.”

“For you, either,” Leah said tersely, frowning at him. A werewolf born he might be, dominant he would no doubt be, but even in his wolf form he was still half the size of everyone else. She had long believed there was no place for children in a pack. God had created werewolf women to be barren; that really said it all to Leah.

Charles lifted his head, bared his teeth. She felt a wave of power from him, like but not like his father’s and brother’s. Her knees trembled. “I _stay_.”

Samuel said something to him then, in his father’s tongue. Whatever it was made Charles scowl and turn on his heel. He began to petulantly move people on, sending them back to their homes.

Leah smirked.

“It’s your duty, woman,” Tag said, propelling her forward.

“Is it?” she murmured, fear coursing through her. “He did not mention this part.”

She put her hands on the door and pushed.

The house was dark, a swollen, strange dark, the shapes that her werewolf vision could make out seeming to throb. _Just a table_ , she told herself. _Just a chair._

The hearth was out – an unheard of thing – and she set to tending to it quickly. A fire would make things more bearable. _He_ , she could feel, was in the other half of the house. The parlor where they held the pack meetings. Closed behind a heavy door that until this moment she had thought was decorative and now she knew better.

She swept the ashes, put them to the side for cleaning with later. Laid wood and kindling and then looked for the tinderbox, finding it on the table. Her hands were shaking which made for tricky work but she finally got a flame and lit the fire, then used the same splint to light the candles on the table.

Once she was certain the fire had caught properly, she wiped down her hands and picked up a candle herself.

Walking quietly, Leah stood at the door to the parlor. She could feel her mate beyond it and hear him, a low, threatening growl. “Bran?” she said, her voice cracking.

The growl paused momentarily and then continued.

So he had heard her. She took heart that the noise had not grown in volume.

Swallowing, she turned the handle and pushed the door open, holding her breath.

At first, all she saw was dark. As her eyes adjusted, as the candle in her hand flickered, she saw shapes form, and none was more terrifying to her than that of the body of the wolf sprawled on the floor and the scent of blood in the air. And his power, unleashed, pouring from him, like ripples of a fast-moving current.

The growl continued, low and deep. She slid a booted foot forward, knees trembling. “Bran?” she said, hoarse with fear. “Bran – it’s Leah. Your mate.”

She heard him swallow, long tongue disappeared into his muzzle and then emerging again. The growl returned but he didn’t move.

She took two very brave steps into the room. “Tag brought me,” she said, laying the blame fully at someone else’s door. “He said you had need of me. I have… come.” She swallowed herself. “So… please don’t… hurt me.”

Three more steps. She was nearly standing over him. She could see his wound now, the matted blood. Carefully she sunk down, placing the candle far enough away that he wouldn’t knock it if he moved suddenly. “Bran, I’m here,” she said quietly. “Please don’t bite me.”

For a few minutes, Leah stayed put. Less to get him used to her presence, more because she was so rigidly scared she couldn’t get any closer. Then she shuffled forward on her knees. She could be brave. There were people outside who were counting on her.

Besides, where would she be if Bran died?

Even from this distance, she had a good look at Bran’s wound. She could still smell fresh blood, which was the strange thing. A wolf like Bran, powerful like Bran, healed quickly.

“There, there,” she whispered, very carefully reaching out to stroke his flank. “Why aren’t you healing, hmm?”

Bran growled helpfully.

She shuffled closer until she was near enough that if she bent, she could smell the wound more closely. Even when she had been human, she had used her nose to understand better.

The wound did not smell right. The metallic scent of blood was tinged with something else. Something that made the hairs in her nose tingle.

Silver.

“How did you… why is there _silver_ in here?” she asked him, surprised into talking normally.

Bran swallowed again. _Get it out,_ he said to her, his voice ringing in her ears. Then, louder. **_GET IT OUT._**

Leah did not need further instruction. Scrambling to her feet, she ran back into the kitchen and looked around. What could she use? There were knives a-plenty of course. Even on the kitchen table, someone had left out a bowie knife, clearly in the process of being cleaned. She flicked through a jar of spoons, wondering if she could perhaps _dig_ the bullet out, but the horror of doing something with so imprecise a tool made her shudder.

Tentatively, Leah picked up a small paring knife and then realized the answer was staring her in the face.

She marched back to Bran, who was lying still and worryingly quiet.

“I’m going to use my fingers,” she announced to him. She had long, slender fingers, with neat nails. She had always been meticulous about such things.

Her announcement caused little in the way of interest.

“Don’t bite me,” Leah said. “I’m— I’m going to stick one finger in and see if I can feel it. Then we’ll know what we’ve got to work with. I need you to stay still, Bran.” She had brought the knife with her. Worst came to worst she would have to cut him a little more.

Then, because she was a practical woman, who had helped bring babies other than her own into the world, she stuck her finger into her mate’s oozing wound.

Bran howled, such a howl that her bowels wobbled precariously as if she might relieve herself in fear. But he didn’t move. She wriggled her finger around until she made contact with something that burned her. “There it is!” she said.

It wasn’t too deep, she thought. But she wouldn’t be able to get another finger in.

“I’m going to have to cut you. I’m sorry.”

Bran growled, low and deep, and kept growling. With shaking hands, Leah picked up the little paring knife. She knew, absolutely knew, if she removed the bullet he would heal from whatever she had done to him. She knew it. And yet…

He barked. _Get on with it._

Gritting her teeth, Leah pushed the knife into his side and _cut._ More blood started to flow, a lot of blood, matting with his fur, bubbling up. She whimpered and stuck her index and thumb back into his body, nearly cried with relief when she pinched the bullet. She pulled, slipped and lost it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she whispered, trying again. This time she was able to drag it forward and suddenly, _pop_ , it was out.

Leah stared at it, this bloody nugget of silver, entirely forgetting that it was burning her too, and then she dropped it on the stone.

“My goodness, I feel quite faint,” she said, woozily swaying to the side. She propped herself up with a less bloody hand.

She felt Bran tug on the pack bonds, beginning to draw strength from them all.

“Think I might lie down.” Leah did so, her head resting quite comfortably on the stone. She took several deep, relieved breaths - she smelled like particularly acrid sweat, underneath the scent of Bran’s blood. She sucked on the metallic taste in her mouth. She had forgotten what this felt like, these moments after fear.

She woke in Bran’s bed – if she had not recognized it from the time she had Changed in there, she would have done from the scent of his bedding alone. Someone had washed her hands poorly and draped her shawls over her. There was a wolf-sized dip to her right where his wolf had curled up.

Leah rolled to sitting and hurried to where she could feel Bran, sitting in the kitchen in his shirtsleeves looking… well, like his normal self.

“Oh good,” she sighed.

“Yes. All better.” The corners of his eyes crinkled with his smile and he took a sip of something steaming hot that smelled deliciously like— “Coffee?”

“Please.”

They drank in contemplative silence, Leah slowly adding more honey until the beverage was more drinkable. Then, Leah’s stomach rumbled and Bran stood again, holding up a finger as if to say ‘ah-hah’. He sliced bread and placed it between the fire contraption that would allow it to toast.

“I have huckleberry preserve or you could have more honey.” His eyes crinkled again, as he had just observed her sweet tooth in action.

“The preserve would be lovely.”

They ate most of the loaf of bread, taking turns in toasting. Bran even found a little pat of butter. It felt like it was a decadent meal.

“Tag was right to get you,” Bran said, apropos of nothing.

“Was he?” 

“I wouldn’t have let anyone else near me in that state.” He tapped his fingers on the table, his eyes fixed to a point somewhere above her head.

“Samuel was annoyed. He wanted to stop me.” She got malicious pleasure from telling him so. Samuel, Leah knew, did not like her and she intended to return the compliment.

Bran didn’t rise to it, however, which she was beginning to learn was very much his way. She felt momentary embarrassment for her childish hope of sowing discontent between father and son. _Ah, well._

She cleared her throat. “I have not come across anything the like before.”

“No, indeed. It wasn’t fired from a musket, either. But something smaller, a handheld weapon.” Bran raised his eyebrows as he gestured with his hand to demonstrate. “Trust the vampires to find a new weapon to use against us.”

*

Leah had been used for men’s needs for most of her werewolf life. As a female, she hadn’t had much choice in the matter and had long learnt to align herself to the strongest man in the pack and, if needs be, suffer the consequences.

In the handful of years since she had met and mated with Bran Cornick, her mind and body had been grateful for the rest. Truth be told, she hadn’t spared much thought for the Marrok himself. If he sought female company elsewhere, he was certainly discrete about it. She caught no hint of it on his person. Aspen Creek was a small town and gossip was rife; if the Marrok had been seen with a woman, she felt for sure she would have heard it.

Someone one would have told her, a woman, no doubt, trying to be ‘helpful’.

So it was with some surprise that she walked to the big house after church on Sunday and witnessed the hasty exit of a young human woman, hurriedly tying up her disheveled hair and heading on the path westwards, away from town.

There were plenty of logical explanations, of course. Leah knew that various wives cleaned and cooked for the Marrok and his family, each taking a turn for the pleasure. Leah herself regularly baked bread, two loaves of which were in the hamper she carried, as well as an extra crock of butter.

And yet…

The door was still ajar and Leah deliberately lightened her footstep, creeping inside the house.

Bran was in the kitchen and he was cross. When he looked up, she caught what she assumed was the expression he intended for his previous guest. When he saw it was her, it morphed abruptly in something close to relief. “Leah.”

“Well, what was that about then?” she asked, somehow grateful to find him fully dressed. “I thought, perhaps, an assignation of some kind.”

Red flooded Bran’s face. “No,” he was all he said, avoiding meeting her eyes.

She made to gesture with her hamper, to explain why she was there herself – a single woman, ostensibly also visiting a widower alone, entirely improperly – when it clicked. “ _Oh_. _She_ intended it thus.”

Bran took the hamper from her. “She was mistaken,” he muttered.

Delight suffused her. His discomfort made more sense. He had been on the receiving end of unwanted attention. Not an illicit affair. “Oh, no, Bran.”

She pictured the hasty exit, trying to recall the details of the woman beyond her hurried body language. Dark hair, perhaps. A blue dress, no doubt her Sunday best. She had not been in church, however, Leah would have remembered the dress. There was little else to do when one was trying to keep entertained during the sermon than to assess what everyone was wearing. “Who was it? I’m not familiar with all the humans.”

“I have no intention of sharing that information. Thank you for this,” Bran said brusquely, walking swiftly into the kitchen.

Leah followed. She sniffed the air curiously but was none the wiser. “I had wondered,” she began.

“Wondered what?”

She backed down. As much as she wanted to ask him, she did have some semblance of the propriety she was raised with. “Never mind. I shall see you at the pack meeting tomorrow?”

Bran shook his head. “No. I have to go out of town tomorrow.”

“Oh? How long for?”

“A few weeks, at least.”

Leah admitted to some feeling of disappointment. “Oh,” she said. 

“You could spend more time with other members of our pack,” he pointed out with a hint of disapproval, as if her disappointment was related to company in general rather than simply his own.

“I hunt with Devon. And Tag is teaching me to shoot,” she said defensively, tilting her nose up in the air. They were reasonably new arrangements and she could admit part of the appeal was that neither were particularly loquacious and both treated her with sincere deference. She enjoyed that, this strange privilege of being the Marrok’s mate.

Bran smiled. “I didn’t know that. That’s good.”

A delicious thought occurred to her then. She could easily track the girl if she left now and followed her scent. Find out if she was someone’s wayward daughter or perhaps – better, from Leah’s perspective – a wayward wife. She started backing towards the door. “Well. Have a safe trip.”

Bran narrowed his eyes. “What are you up to?”

She wasn’t certain what possessed her, she really wasn’t. Mischief – insane mischief – seemed to be the answer. She laughed and spun on her heel, started running in the direction the girl had gone.

“Leah— dammit!” Feet pounded after her.

She had a head start but, unconstrained by the layers of female clothing, he soon caught up. He tossed her against a tree, robbing her of breath, and pinned her with one arm pressed across her collarbone, the other on her upper arm.

Leah saw from his face she had made a grave mistake. What she had seen as play, he had seen as a gross breach of her conduct and obedience. His eyes were solidly amber.

She lowered her eyes submissively. “I’m sorry, Alpha,” she whispered, cringing.

“I forbid you from interfering with her, Leah. You are not to seek her out, you are not to ask after her. If you do – however accidentally – discover who she is, you are not to shame her. Do you understand me?” he all-but roared in her face. “I forbid it.”

Frantically, she nodded.

“Swear you will obey me, Leah.”

It was unnecessary for him to make her swear; he was doing it to make a point. “I—I do so swear it,” Leah whispered, her eyes filling with tears. It was the first time she had born the brunt of his anger. She did not like it, not one bit. It somehow hurt more than the rage she had faced with her Alpha before him.

Bran dropped her unceremoniously and walked back the way they had come, shaking his hands to the side as if he was trying to fling the sensation of trapping her from him. She wanted to follow, to try and make amends somehow, but her knees were quaking and her torso was throbbing where he had held her.

Leah lowered herself to the ground and sat, letting the tears fall, more a response to shock than anything else. It was not the first time she had been shouted at by her Alpha and she had no doubt it would be her last. It felt unjust though. She didn’t think she had meant any harm. Why did he care so much for this human, anyhow?

Perhaps this girl did mean something to him. For reasons Leah didn’t want to dig too deeply into, that was an unpleasant thought that made more tears fall down her face.

After a few minutes, Leah fished a handkerchief from her pocket and dried her face and blew her nose. She was grateful he would be away for a few weeks, now. She did not want to see him and remember this moment.

*

There were monsters in the forest. Monsters of their own kind, no less. Men, and even a woman or two, whom Bran had warned her to keep away from. _You are not dominant enough_ , he had told her after her first couple of weeks of settling in. _Even though you are my mate, they will not care._

Leah learnt to recognize the signs of one of his wildlings’ abodes by the sheer lack of scent that surrounded them. The rest of the pack had been similarly warned – and there were stronger dominants than she. That was a comforting thought. She did not like to be considered weak. She liked it less now that she had become the Marrok’s mate. The power was going to her head a little, she knew that.

The problem was, sometimes the wildlings took it upon themselves to up and _move_ without warning. And one day, nearly three weeks into Bran’s absence, Leah stumbled upon one whilst out foraging. Or rather, she stumbled _into_ one of his traps and found herself upside down, wrapped in rope, caught by some mechanical contraption involving levers.

Not in any immediate danger, Leah hung for a few moments, trying to assess her situation. The ropes would not hold her for long, she could certainly tear her way out. She wasn’t even that far from the ground. This was a trap for deer or other large prey, not for werewolves.

Her plan to tear herself out came to an abrupt halt when a man crept from the bushes.

“Oh good grief,” Leah muttered. He was clearly a wildling, could not have looked more like his namesake. His hair was matted and long, he was wearing what looked like a _loin_ cloth made from a pelt. He was carrying a wicked-looking cudgel, stained with use.

“Woman,” he said, looking up at her and scratching his horrible beard.

“Yes. I am Leah…Cornick,” she added, for it was true and not true. “I am Bran Cornick’s mate.”

“Are you,” the creature murmured to himself. “I knew he had taken a mate. He told me so.” He ambled over to a tree and began to unwind the trail of rope that Leah had so foolishly missed, mixed as it was with vines. She felt the rope cage she was trapped in give a little, abruptly.

“Ah—” she started, but never finished, as she was suddenly dropped several feet, smack into the ditch that had been dug, the scene of her initial undoing. She landed on her behind, a tender area, and rolled to the side, tears pooling at the shock of it. Even knowing she was vulnerable and exposed couldn’t overcome that first burst of pain.

She felt the tug of ropes being dragged from her and, cautiously, not leaning on her sore part, she eased herself upright. She saw the wildling was carefully picking the ropes from her, muttering to himself. Her head was released and with relief, she tugged off the shawl she had worn to protect her newly washed hair from the slight drizzle that had been a feature of the last few days.

This action made him glance up. A look of horror crossed his face and the cudgel, with its sharp and nasty edges, flew straight at her head, knocking her clear to the side and into the tree. She knew nothing more but black.

*

Leah woke, bound and gagged, in a dark, dank cave that stank of the wildling and was clearly his primary residence. There were furs and skins on the floor, even hanging meat. A small collection of pots and pans rested on a low, rickety little table.

At first, seeing she was alone, naturally she tried to escape – trying to roll to her feet in her woozy state, not realizing that he had bound her wrists to her ankles in a series of complicated knots that not even her werewolf strength could release. She tumbled straight into an outcrop of rock and managed to knock herself out for the second time.

When she woke again, the wildling had returned and was standing over her. At this angle, she saw rather more of his unkempt nether regions that she wished to and a wave of sickness rolled over her, the thought that she was alone and trapped with a man not in his right mind, that he might force himself upon her, _again_ , after all this time.

She trembled.

“Not the Marrok’s mate,” he grumbled.

She trembled a little more. There went the thin veneer of Bran’s absent protection.

“I am,” she whispered. It came out croaky. She tried to shuffle back, away from him but she was too tangled up, her skirts and her shawl and the rope twisting about her. Frustrated, she tried again, “I _am_ Bran’s mate.”

The man tilted his head to the side and made a noise with his mouth, as if he was trying to taste her words. “Truth,” he said slowly.

Leah nodded - a mistake. Her vision wavered. She closed her eyes for a moment, willing the feeling of sick panic to pass.

He left her again and it could have been for a long time, it could have been for minutes. There was no light into this cave; she had no sense of real time, just a miserable sense that she had made a significant error and that she was alone.

He did return, however, and this time he was holding a tin cup, the sort she had in her own house. He put it down next to her. “Drink.” He tapped his head, as if to convey greater meaning which was lost on her.

The water smelled fresh and clean and Leah was suddenly desperately thirsty. She managed to sip from the cup, using her tongue to bring liquid into her mouth. He watched her the whole time, an unnerving experience, and just as she had started to get a rhythm, he pulled the cup away.

“The Marrok is away,” he told her, putting the cup with the pots and pants.

“Yes. He’ll be back soon,” she said, though she didn’t know if that was true or not. It occurred to her then that Bran might, through whatever means that connected them, know that she was in difficulties. Would he hurry home sooner? she wondered. Perhaps not.

“We’ll wait.” He crouched down and Leah averted her eyes. “I’m Jericho.”

Jericho. It wasn’t a name with which she was familiar. With Bran, she had met Hester and Jonesy. The three Viking brothers who had eyed her like something to be snacked upon. A few others. She wondered if Jericho was more unstable or if it was the reverse that was true – that Bran had only introduced her formally to the ones that really concerned him.

He reached out and she flinched. “Sorry, sorry,” he said gently, probing her head. “I hurt you. I— I didn’t mean to.” For a brief second, his eyes flashed yellow. “But you are not his mate. You are a liar.”

*

Time passed. Jericho allowed her to sip from the tin cup and then he fed her scraps of dried meat that tasted more of his fingers than it did the animal it had come from. She grew weak quickly. Her werewolf body required more sustenance than he was giving her, a fact she imagined he well knew. The wounds on her head were healing slowly so she tried to make herself sleep a great deal. If she couldn’t eat, then she could conserve energy, heal, and make another attempt to escape.

When she was awake, when his eyes were a normal color and not the color of his beast, she tried to reason with him. “Why would I lie about being his mate?” she asked.

Jericho shrugged. “Why would a woman lie about anything?”

This appeared to be a rhetorical question.

Sometimes, she heard him singing in a low, sweet voice. This pack, Bran’s pack, were very musical. If they couldn’t play an instrument, then they almost certainly could sing. Since she had lived in Aspen Creek, she had spent more nights listening to music than she had in her entire life before, outside of church. 

It might have been soothing if the cudgel he had used to hurt her wasn’t resting against the cave wall, stained now with her blood.

She tried twice more to escape. The first time, she attempted to use the edge of the rock she had knocked herself unconscious on to cut at the ropes. It was agonizing work. She had been trapped in the same position so long that her body seemed to have seized up and each motion sent waves of agony through her. After a while, exhaustion set in and she’d done nothing more than slightly worry at one rope. She heard his slow gait return and she dropped back, perspiration on her brows and on her top lip.

The second time, she managed to roll herself into a kind of half crouch. This time, she had practiced moving beforehand, trying to get her body to cooperate, and the pain was not as great. She managed a shuffling, inelegant movement that she quickly realized would serve her poorly – she would still be in the cave when Jericho returned.

She tried a hop instead and, whilst her body protested mightily, it got her further. With a burst of vigor, she hopped forward five more times and then leaned against a wall, panting. She had barely rounded a corner and could see no egress from the cave. If she had been able to turn, Leah would have seen the pots and pans, the bedroll Jericho snored near her on when he did sleep.

She managed a few more hops, then a few more. It was slow going and Leah was afraid that Jericho would return. His life seemed to follow no pattern. He ate when he wanted, napped when he wanted and left her whenever he had something else to do and for different lengths of time. Leah had made a snap decision to make her escape attempts as soon as he left, knowing full well that he might have simply gone to relieve himself and he might catch her in the act of her escape.

She suspected she might meet the cudgel rather sooner than she would have liked, if that was the case.

Leah forced herself on and, wishful thinking it might have been, thought she was beginning to see light. Perhaps there was a chance of freedom. Her hope was rapidly dashed when between one blink and the next, the shape of a man filled her vision. For the briefest of moments, she considered screaming, before the awareness that she had carried with her since they had mated made sense.

She slumped against the side of the cave. “Oh, thank you Lord,” she said.

Bran, moving with no real sense of urgency, pulled a knife from his boot and began cutting away her ropes. He nicked her ankle and they both hissed – him in apology, her in pain.

He helped her stand, rubbing her wrists to get some movement back into them. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“No,” Leah sighed, wanting to lean on him. Her extremities were throbbing. “My head is better.”

Bran inspected this, touched the crusted, scabbing patch of her hair. “We’ll wash that.”

“Where is he?”

He made a rumbling noise of discontent. “Jericho is making himself scarce.”

“Hmph,” Leah said, as Bran put her arm around his shoulder and his around her waist, walking her slowly in the direction he had come. She hobbled, wincing, her muscles protesting at the unusual position.

“It was quite the welcome party I returned to. My sons and half the pack waiting to tell me my mate had disappeared and could not be found. Then Jericho emerging from the undergrowth, sheepishly admitting he had captured you, thinking you some kind of spy, I think.”

“He refused to believe me when I said I was your mate.”

“Yes. My fault. He met… Blue Jay. I don’t believe he was aware that she had passed.”

Thankfully, the brightness of the day distracted Leah from the thump-thump she had felt as he mentioned the woman before her. Tears fell down her face and she shielded her eyes. “Why is it so _sunny_?” she muttered, resentfully, overcome.

“It’s actually raining.” Bran’s fingers touched her scalp again. “He got you good and proper, didn’t he.”

“I’ve had worse,” she sighed, wiping her face. She had been beaten many times. “Is it far?”

“Indeed it is. Which is why I brought my horse.” Bran indicated this animal that Leah had quite ignored with some amusement.

The prospect of getting _onto_ said horse did not fill Leah with great joy. Horses and werewolves did not generally get on.

“Let’s sit for a while,” Bran suggested, easing her down. He went to his horse, patting the beast’s neck affectionately before pulling a water-skin from his saddlebag and then–

“Oh, thank goodness, food,” she said with real feeling, as he handed her a cloth wrapped parcel and her stomach roared with sudden hunger.

“Eat slowly. And drink slowly. Or you’ll make yourself sick,” he advised, sitting next to her on the dirt.

Leah had found Bran’s advice often annoying but frequently correct. She ate the cheese in small bites, the burst of salt like nectar on her tongue. She moaned and then took a small sip of water. “I am so hungry.” There was a small meat pie and she forced herself to nibble it cautiously.

“Yes, I can see that. I’m afraid that won’t sustain you for long.” He lifted her wrist critically, circling it with his fingers. Werewolves lost weight quickly and she could see her bones more clearly than she would like. “Samuel thought you had been gone for five days.”

It was both longer and shorter than she had thought. She tilted her head up to feel the rain on her face. “What will you do? About Jericho?”

“I don’t know. He thought he was acting on the good of the pack.”

Leah felt her lip curl. “I see.”

“And yet he did kidnap and wound my mate,” Bran added, ignoring her acerbic tone, almost as if he was talking to himself. “So reparations should be made.”

She suddenly did not like the direction in which this was going.

His hazel eyes honed in on her like a hawk. “Perhaps _you_ should decide his punishment.”

Leah shoved the rest of the meat pie into her mouth in an inelegant manner and chewed, purely to prevent herself from saying something she might regret. “Shall we be going?” she suggested, after she had swallowed what felt like a lead weight in pie.

*

Two days after her visit with Jericho, Bran came by the house. He handed her a cloth-wrapped parcel first and she wiped her flour-dusted hands on her apron, unwrapping this article curiously at the clean end of her table.

At the revelation of the neatly folded lengths of dress fabric, her mouth dropped open. “You bought me a gift!” she gasped.

Like many women, most of Leah’s clothes were made of plain, dark colors. The kind that would wear well with the daily grind of chores. She had one Sunday dress, a pale green that she had remade several times over and it showed. In this parcel there was a lovely periwinkle blue-sprigged cream calico – calico! – _and_ a deep, rich burgundy wool. And, to her absolute shock, a length of lace. 

She sat down, abruptly.

“There’s— a little something else,” he murmured, moving aside the wool fabric to show her a slim volume.

“Godey's Lady's Book,” she read out loud.

“There’s short stories and articles. And a fashion plate and pattern at the front. I thought you might like it.”

There was a distinct possibility that Leah was going to cry. “I’m very touched,” she said honestly, staring down at the cover of the magazine. She read little, as books had not played a significant part in her previous pack’s lives and she had never really had the time. But perhaps a short story would be a pleasant, manageable thing. “I don’t think I’ve had a gift since I was a child, Bran. Thank you.” She looked up at him then, hoping she could convey some of her feelings without words.

He didn’t look uncomfortable, exactly, but there was definitely something about this situation that obviously wasn’t sitting right by him. He shifted nervously and the Marrok was never nervous.

“You’re very welcome. I am sorry about what happened.”

“It’s no matter. I thought about what you said. He— didn’t hurt me, not with the intent to kill.” She suspected Jericho had left her the wildflowers currently decorating her mantelpiece that morning. It appeared to be her day for unexpected gifts. “I can’t say it was a wonderful experience, or that he and I might ever be friends, but at the very least I learnt my lesson to be more aware of my surroundings.”

Bran nodded, slowly. “I’m glad. That wasn’t what I was talking about, however.” 

Leah’s brow crinkled in confusion. “What were you talking about, then?”

He touched a finger to his temple and scratched, a half smile crossing his face. “I don’t usually handle women the way I handled you the last time we saw one another. I overreacted.”

She blinked. “Oh yes. That.”

She didn’t know what to say. He was apologizing. Truth be told, after a few days of being hurt and angry about it, Leah had all-but forgotten it. She felt a flash of that hurt again but couldn’t find the anger. If anything, all she could really recall now was the press of his body against hers. She had, perhaps, recalled that more than once.

“It’s fine. I— we don’t know each other very well, Bran. And I, if I had been that young woman, I would not want anyone to know what I had done either.” And specifically that he had turned her away. 

Leah had seen her, twice, in the weeks that Bran had been gone. She was someone’s unmarried daughter and judging from what Leah had observed, she was a little wayward and frequently scolded. She had been much the same, once. Young and impetuous. The impetuous part had never really gone away.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw his hand lift slowly and then he rested it on the crown of her head, like a warm benediction. She shivered a little at being touched with such gentleness. “Thank you,” he said.

Leah stroked her thumb over the calico. Cotton was expensive. _Lace_ was expensive. “Thank _you_ ,” she murmured wistfully.

“I have one more thing.”

From the pocket of his jacket, he pulled a ball of muslin. Perplexed, she watched as he shook it out. It was a shirt and, from the smell of it, it was his.

“Do you want me to wash it?” she asked, prepared to be irritated.

He laughed. “No. Part of what confirmed Jericho’s disbelief was that you didn’t smell like me.”

“Ah.” She saw where this was going. Scent was how werewolves marked their territory. And whilst Leah was very much her own person, she was also Bran’s. At least, magically speaking. But for the simpler wolves, those who relied on their instincts more than others, as it seemed many of Bran’s wolves did, the fact that she did not _smell_ like his mate would have been confusing. There was no such thing as a lone female, after all, and most female werewolves were mated and married within a handful of years of their Change. It was safer that way.

Leah knew she was an anomaly.

“It might help with more than just Jericho,” Bran said, thoughtfully.

Leah nodded. On reflection, she did not mind the idea of smelling like Bran. He was very soothing to her wolf. Once he was gone, she tucked his shirt into her bed – undecided if she would sleep in it or simply sleep with it.

*

Ewan Hopper was a spry, handsome man and though Leah had never found men shorter than her to be particularly appealing, there was something about him – something she couldn’t quite put her finger on – that set her senses tingling.

He was a rogue, of course, like all werewolf men, and when they were introduced his eyes twinkled at her and he looked her up and down in her new dress in the way a man does to a woman he finds desirable. Later, as Leah found herself in the kitchen, directing quantities of food to the parlor where Bran’s western territories Alphas were mingling, she overheard him asking Samuel about her outside as Ewan had a particular fondness for cigars and Bran did not like the smell of the smoke in his house.

“— lives elsewhere,” Samuel explained, somewhat grumpily. Leah was not his favorite person. In fact, she was close to being his _least_ favorite.

“Unusual.”

“It’s a confusing situation. But if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, however, I wouldn’t. Da has… a peculiar regard for her.”

“Come now, Samuel, are you telling me you do not _regard_ your step-mother?”

“If you spent more time talking to her than admiring her pretty face, you would lose your regard too. I don’t know what my father was thinking.”

Leah’s lip curled in irritation. Samuel’s dislike of her she could manage but him _sharing_ this dislike outside of the pack wasn’t acceptable. She intended to give him a piece of her mind. She started to reach behind her for her apron string when, behind her, movement distracted her – an abrupt gasp from one of the women tending the kitchen stove – and the Marrok appeared, holding a book that he had clearly fetched from the other half of the house.

Like her, Bran had worn his best clothes for the afternoon’s festivities, including a patterned waistcoat that she had made him for the previous Christmas. He looked more than usually handsome and she wasn’t surprised one of the women had gasped, though no doubt it was more because of his tendency to sneak up on a person than because of his fine figure.

“People who listen in to conversations not for their ears rarely hear what they want,” Bran whispered to her in passing, his mouth brushing over the short hairs at her temple. His hand touched her waist. He left her then and stepped outside. She felt, rather than heard, him taking Samuel to task for speaking ill of her. She knew his anger now like the back of her hand.

Leah had not won herself many friends in Aspen Creek, for one reason or another, but Bran himself would not hear a bad word spoken of her. She was his mate and deserved respect. He was particularly hard on his sons for this, who had a tendency to be more outspoken. 

Samuel was made to apologize to her, in person, and Leah struggled to receive this with any poise, instead smirking in the way that only annoyed the man more. Bran rolled his eyes. “Gracious, as ever, Leah,” he said to her softly once Samuel had bowed and made his leave. 

Leah pulled a face. “You don’t truly care that he doesn’t like me,” she responded.

Bran’s surprise flickered on his face before he could suppress it. It was true and she knew it. “It would be more comfortable for me if you both had a mutual respect for one another. He is Second in this pack.”

This was true. In dominance, after Bran, there was no one equal to Samuel – though Charles was clearly going to be when he was fully grown – but Leah had never got the impression he _liked_ it. She sighed. “All right. I will try to mind him better.” For Bran, she thought. No one else.

Her mate touched her waist again and this time his hand lingered a little longer. “Your new dress is very fine,” he said and, in much the same way as Ewan, looked her up and down.

Leah smiled widely. It was gratifying to be admired. “Thank you.” She moved her hips from side to side a little, her skirts swishing. For this dress, made from yet another gift of his, she had made them a little fuller, using the pattern in another ladies’ magazine. She felt pretty. She watched Bran’s eyes follow her hips and wondered about his _peculiar regard_ for her.

She stopped swaying, feeling uncomfortable. She liked Bran. Very much, even. But she did not want his attentions in that way. Did she?

As if knowing the way her thoughts had drifted, Bran left her then with a respectful nod and a vague smile, and went about his business of talking with his Alphas. She stood to the side, acting as his hostess by exchanging pleasantries and making sure there was enough food and drink for this hungry audience, but otherwise mostly observed. There were powerful men in this room. Old, strong wolves with packs of their own, with long histories, but there were none so powerful as Bran. He was a great man already. And if he had his way, one day he would be greater still.

It was something to think of. Their bargain was a permanent one which she had known and not known when she had made it. She had wanted to escape and he had seemed a better option, her decision to do so made in less than a day. He _was_ a better option but she had not looked much further than the next few weeks and months of her life. Now, as Bran stood and gave his speech to his men, this army of wolves who would do his bidding, she thought of how she was really and truly the mate of this great man. She would be the woman at his side as he clawed his way across the continent.

Her fingers brushed over where his hand had been and she was uncertain, for the first time, of the future she had chosen for herself. And how long their lives could continue the way they were – separate but not.

*

Werewolves were tactile creatures and Bran was, she thought, trying to get her used to his touch. They had been mated for several years and in the space of one month, since the meeting with his Alphas, he had touched her more than she had been touched by anyone since she had arrived in Aspen Creek.

He was polite about it, of course. He didn’t manhandle her, just brushed his fingers over the small of her back, touched his fingers to her hair or her cheek. Sometimes he pressed his whole hand against her, on her shoulder, or her waist and she would feel it still later, much later, lying in her bed that smelled of him permanently now.

She began to, not crave it precisely, but look for it. She wanted to be touched by him. She _liked_ being touched by him.

Bran came upon her early one afternoon, lost so deeply in her thoughts that she only became aware of him when his scuffed boots came into her vision. It was a warm, sunny day towards the end of fall. It was a busy time of year. Like many, she had been helping out in the fields, bringing in the harvest, and that morning she had been up early with the other women, preserving what they could for the winter. She felt like she hadn’t had a moment alone to herself for weeks.

“You look very content,” he said as he approached. He had a bag over his shoulder and was smiling in that way he had, secretive, like he knew something she didn’t.

Leah stood, brushing out her skirts. “Are you visiting your wildlings?”

“I am, yes.”

“Then let me give you something to take.” She had formed an affection for some of the wildlings over the years, even for Jericho, who when he saw her now went wide-eyed with upset and scurried off. Winter could be long and hard and the people of Aspen Creek tended to give small comforts to those who suffered it alone.

Leah went into the small, dark lean-to off her kitchen and took down a few jars. As the Marrok’s mate, she was frequently gifted with foodstuffs and she could do without.

Before she turned, she could tell through their strange connection that Bran had followed her into her private space. Normally, it did not bother her. He was the only man she allowed in her home because her wolf trusted him in a way that she trusted no one else.

Turning, she found his eyes were alight with humor and something else, that nameless, hungry thing men had for women. She bit her bottom lip and tucked the jars away into the bag he was carrying. He watched her mouth. “Something happened to you today,” she murmured. He wasn’t normally so overt.

Bran tilted his head to the side and put his hands on either side of the door, keeping her half inside the store room. “Nothing has happened to me.”

Leah blew out a breath, fluttering the hair at her temples. Her skin prickled with his desire, perhaps even her own. She looked to the right, to the table with the dried lavender as its centerpiece. “Well, Bran Cornick, get whatever it is over with.”

Bran laughed silently and stepped closer to her, well beyond the boundary of acceptable closeness between two unmarried persons. His hips bumped hers, her bosom brushed his chest. He was comfortably two, perhaps three, inches taller than her and she had to tilt her head back to look him in the eye. Even as she did so, she knew what she would be inviting. 

Bran kissed her. No savage slanting mouth, no excess saliva or panting breaths. Just his lips against hers, gently coaxing her to respond. He didn’t close his eyes, either, nor she hers. Not initially. It quickly became too much for Leah, not used to such extremes of intimacy with a man. When she closed her eyes, she sighed and Bran slipped his tongue inside her mouth.

Her hands fluttered at her sides. She wanted to touch him so she pressed her fingers against his abdomen, then raised herself on tiptoe so she could hold on to his shoulders. She pushed against him, her body making demands before her brain could keep up and her body demanded he was closer. Much closer.

But Bran kept his pace slow and steady, his hands flexing on the door opening, kept well away from her. Just his mouth, his lips and his tongue moving against hers. She could hear his heart beat faster, could feel the heat beat from his body. She knew the scent of desire and yet he held himself back.

Impatient, Leah wrapped her arms around his neck. Suddenly she was the one slanting her mouth over his, _she_ was the hungry one. It was her breath she could hear, her heartbeat, her need, _her_ lack of control. She’d never felt anything like it. It felt her like very bones wanted him.

Leah pulled back from him, suddenly, almost embarrassed by her own response. His eyes were open still, though near-black, the pigment a mere frame around dilated pupils.

“Do you want to stop?” he asked her.

“I— do _you_ want to stop?” A curious question to ask a man but Leah felt strangely like it needed to be said.

His secret smile flickered. “I think you can tell I do not.” Finally, he moved his hands from the walls, tucking them over the slight curve of her waist. He pulled her hips tighter against his so she could indeed feel how much he desired her. She had felt flushed before but a new heat built, low in her body, where a man and a woman would come together. “But perhaps we should think on this for a couple of days.”

Leah’s eyes widened. “I shouldn’t think I will think of much else,” she replied hotly. She pressed a hand to her cheek, hoping for coolness, but even her fingers were warm from where they had been linked about his neck.

He barked out a laugh. “Your mouth must have constantly got in you in trouble.”

Said mouth moved into a pout of its own accord. “I don’t know what you mean, I’m sure.”

“Mmm,” Bran replied, leaning down to kiss her once more, just a quick press of his lips and then gone. He let go of her hips and took a step back. She wouldn’t go so far as to say she _swooned_ but her knees did feel a little weak. “Thank you for the preserves. It was a kind gesture and will be gratefully received.”

It was her turn to make only a noise. He backed out of her house, watching her with a smile. She stood for a long time after he had gone, her body throbbing for him, wondering what the repercussions of this would be.

*

There were no repercussions, not immediately. Bran’s visit to whichever wildling that day resulted in an emergency need for a cabin to be built before the first snow. She wondered if it was Jericho.

While most men in Aspen Creek could be called upon to help with such work, few were dominant enough to do so in wildling territory so it was just Bran, Samuel and Tag who set to work. The fastest route was past her house every day, so she saw them each morning and sometimes they would stop to say hello if she was out in the garden, putting her plants to bed.

After the cabin was built came the first snow and with it the usual cascade of problems in their small town, leaving Bran to organize solutions. A widow with a roof that needed mending, a snow-laden tree that took out the Walkers’ kitchen, a spate of influenza that widowed one woman and orphaned three young boys. Leah herself was busy, battling daily with snow and trying to keep her house warm. She was no stranger to childbirth and found herself trudging through snow for two expectant mothers after the midwife as well as most of the human women took sick with a vomiting illness. Neither birth was easy though both babies, thankfully, survived. Now they would have to make it through the next few months of winter. 

In heavy snow, a pack run was next to impossible. Out in the wild, real wolves would be hunkered down, saving their energy, and so the werewolves of Aspen Creek copied them, Changing within their homes. By now, Leah had a stack of ladies magazines, Bran’s gift of choice for her when he returned from him occasional trips away. She read by candlelight most evenings but whereas once this solitude might have pleased her, she found herself daydreaming of her mate, imaging his mouth on hers, amongst other things. It was exciting and terrifying.

Leah wondered, of course, if he had changed his mind in the weeks that had passed. Or if it had just been a fleeting need. Werewolf men had powerful desires, she knew that well enough, but Bran was not like other werewolf men.

Early one morning she heard a scratch on the door. She opened the top hatch and was briefly confused to see nothing but white piles of snow. A snort drew her eyes downwards and she looked into the amused face of a familiar grey wolf with snowy-tipped tail.

“Sneaky,” Leah told him, unlocking the lower door and quickly letting him in. “Don’t shake!”

Leah grabbed a cloth from in front of the fire and wiped him down, including his paws. “What are you doing here?”

_Visiting. May I Change?_

She swept a gesture towards her room. She was a meticulously tidy person so had no fear that he might find clothes on the floor or the water from her wash basin splashed about the place. Ignoring the sounds that accompanied a werewolf change, she set water on to boil, assuming a hot drink would be welcome. When he returned, he was wearing the shirt that she kept under her pillow that hit him just above his knees.

She raised a finger. “Bear with me.”

From the trunk at the bottom of her bed, she found a pair of wool trousers. She presented these to him and, narrowing his eyes, Bran lifted them to his nose. “Whose are these?” he asked, a hint of a growl in his voice.

“They’re mine,” she said, smiling at this display of territorial manliness. “Truly. I’m learning how to ride and it’s much easier in trousers.”

Bran blinked at her. “I think I should like to see that,” he said, pulling them on.

Leah poured him some tea, a gift from one of the fathers of the baby she had helped deliver. Baby George was, by all accounts, thriving and had a good set of lungs. Since she’d had the werewolf father alone, Leah had taken him to task for getting his wife with child nine months before the middle of winter. He’d clearly never been adjured so, nor on such a delicate topic and had flushed quite red, and ‘yes ma’am’d her repeatedly, worrying his hat between his fingers and promising never to do it again.

A likely tale.

All of Leah’s children had been born in Spring, like clockwork. But then her mother had been a wise-woman and had instructed Leah at a young age on the ways between a man and a woman, the patterns and rhythms of a woman’s body. It was information that was no longer really useful to her any more.

Bran sipped his tea. “I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you.”

She shrugged. “It’s been busy. Have you found homes for the boys who lost their parents?”

He nodded, drew a finger over a vein in her table. “Yes. Megan and Bryan are taking them in.”

She knew the couple. Bryan was a werewolf, a fierce man, and Megan his petite little wife. A human. They were not mated but seemed fond of one another. Bryan disapproved of Leah and she suspected it was because of the arrangement she and Bran had. He was old fashioned, in that way, and she got the feeling that he had long wished for a mate and felt they were squandering their ‘gift’.

“I met one of our new arrivals yesterday. Little Henry Wallace. His mother tells me you were very skilled at assisting in the birth.”

“Not my first. I helped my mother, when I was young.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Did you indeed?”

Leah opened her mouth to explain, to talk about a childhood spent peering between the bloody legs of women in labor, and then thought otherwise. “Did you come here to talk about my qualifications?”

Bran smiled a broad, white-toothed smile. “No, I came here to take you to bed.” He put down his tin mug and his eyebrows raised again, questioning. “If you’ll still have me.”

Like he’d struck a match within her, Leah felt her body start to hum with heat. She nodded, just managing to restrain herself from making this a frantic, despite plea, and stared hard at the table.

Bran leaned forwards and touched his finger to her chin, tilting her head. “Say the words, Leah. Say you’ll have me.”

She didn’t know why it was important to him but she nodded again. “I’ll have you, Bran Cornick,” she said. The wolf inside her, a mostly quiet beast, seemed to stand to attention as if Leah was making a promise.

Bran, too, suddenly looked serious. “And I shall have you.”

*

They were easily able to keep the developments of their relationship secret over the winter. Bran was his own man and if he slipped from his house for the night, neither of his sons questioned it. That he travelled back from her house in his wolf skin, passing through banks of snow, brushing up against winter greenery, meant that her scent didn’t travel with him, no matter what they did together in the confines of her bed – and, indeed, outside of it.

Leah had been married – and happily – once. Her husband had cared for her pleasure and been liberated in his thinking. After him, her liaisons, a gentle word for what had taken place once she had become a werewolf, had been mixed. Leah had discovered in her stronger body she did not mind rough handling, too much, but men who did not care for her soul, often did not care for her pleasure. There had been very little pleasure in her life since she had been bitten and Changed.

It came as no surprise that Bran, who might not care overmuch for her soul, _did_ care that she enjoyed being with him. And she did. Frequently. After the first time – that fumbling, frantic tumble – their coming together required little in the way of words. Often it required little in the way of removing clothes, Leah biting down hard on his shoulder as he thrust inside of her, holding handfuls of her skirts and petticoats to the side.

He was clear, though, on what it meant for them. In that it meant nothing. “It doesn’t change our agreement,” he said, just before the first time, as she lay under him panting.

She shook her head in agreement and understanding. “No.”

It was still only a mating, an arrangement between their wolf spirits. That there was an additional dimension to it now was meaningless. This was the way of werewolves. Leah had to put aside those remnants of the human woman she had been, the moral code she had been raised with, one that said sexual congress between two people should be within the bonds of marriage, because those morals didn’t apply to werewolves.

She had her own life and he had his. And they had a bargain.

And so, Leah would wake each morning with nothing but the scent of him on her linen. She could just enjoy his body – and she was embarrassed to the degree to which she _did_ enjoy his body. She would find herself thinking of him at the strangest of moments, kneading bread or beating her laundry, wondering at his hands on her body, the way they fitted together like a lock-box. She’d feel that heat pool between her legs and her cheeks flush and wonder when he could come to see her next.

As Spring came, the snow melting away to reveal the almost shocking green beneath it, Bran became more circumspect, creeping to her house well after dark.

“Concerned for my virtue?” she asked as she let him in, dressed only in her night shirt and her shawl.

He kissed her, first, a passionate press of his month and tongue. She could feel he was already aroused and she untucked his shirt from his trousers so she could touch his warm skin, stroke her fingers over the muscles of his back. “There are,” he said, pausing to push her hair to the side so he could nibble her neck, “some busybodies in town,” he paused again to focus his attentions enough that her knees wobbled, “who would make things difficult for you.”

Ah, yes, of course. A widowed woman, flagrantly carrying on with the Marrok, would be the one socially shunned. He, meanwhile, would suffer nothing. A man had needs, of course. She, a woman, should know better. 

When they had enjoyed each other a time or two, she boldly straddled his thighs, nude, knowing that this was a view he particularly enjoyed, and re-plaited her hair. “I don’t think I would care overmuch,” she decided. There were few people’s opinions she put any store by, certainly none of the busy-body women in their town.

Bran stroked his hands up her thighs. His eyes were not on her face. “My wolf does not like it when you are disrespected.”

“He would be bothered by human women tattling?” She couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice. She had heard all the stories now, of the Berserker and his power. It seemed unimaginable to her that he would be remotely interested on the by-play between women.

Bran’s hands drifted up to cup her breasts. “It bothers us both. Come down here, now,” he instructed, sternly, a by-no-means-boyish glint in his eye, “so that I can put my mouth on you.”

*

Leah suspected his sons worked it out first. From her perspective, she and Bran behaved in much the same formal manner they always did. In public, there was always a respectable distance between them and now she made sure she was never seen alone in his company. She didn’t believe she was more forwards in her conversation, nor did she push herself into their family circle. She _thought_ Bran was equally polite to her.

And yet Samuel grumbled about it ‘making more sense now’ and Charles started to refer to her as his step-mother, in a sullen, half-joking voice that made Bran frown.

She had no intention of being his step-mother and told the boy so. He was less a boy now, having well achieved his majority, and had moved out of his father’s home. Samuel, too, had married a human woman and was doing his best to get a child on her, with little success. Leah watched as his wife grew tired and grey, each lost child taking years from her life. 

His sons may well have been the first but they were not the last. Two winters had passed since she and Bran had consummated their mating in the more traditional way, but truthfully, Leah did not notice the marked difference in the women in town until she found herself sitting alone in church. Leah looked at the bare pew beside her, frowned in confusion, and then dismissed it. She cared not for the opinion of humans.

What she had not perceived was that much of the exchange of goods that happened without payment in town took place _because_ of the human women. Flour and preserves, dried and smoked meats – all these she exchanged for the butter and milk from her goats, the herbs from her garden, and some of it was gifted because of her elevated position of respect as the Marrok’s mate. The _virtuous_ Marrok’s mate.

Her virtue, what it was, was now compromised. No matter that she had been married and widowed once already. No matter that she was not human and human rules did not apply. In appearance, Leah was a young woman and she was allowing a widower to frequent her bed.

She did not bring it up with Bran, instead pondered it herself, attempted to find a solution. She had come to Aspen Creek with a little money and she had been careful with it. She had some jewelry that she knew better than to sell within the town, instead adjured Tag to escort her to Great Falls, where she could pawn the wedding ring of the man she had once had a quiet love for, the necklace that her mother had given her on her eighteen birthday and a small pearl brooch begrudgingly given to her by her Alpha her first Christmas as a werewolf. Though she was sad to part with these things, if she continued her careful ways, this money would last her years. She was determined not to be a burden and, worse, for Bran to think that perhaps it would be better if they ended the amorous side of their relationship.

She took to hunting by herself, Changing as it grew dark and taking off into the forest. She was an excellent hunter and felled deer all by herself, filling her belly as much as possible to sustain her through the day. In the dark, on her four feet, she made plans. She could sell her goat milk and eggs at the general store, that would bring in a little income. She was also a reasonable seamstress. Perhaps she could offer her services. She had seen small handwritten cards on the noticeboard in store advertising such services. There were plenty of single men in town, too, who might pay for a home cooked meal.

Lying on one of her preferred rocks, Leah rested her muzzle on her paws, feeling a little melancholy. It turned out she _did_ mind the whispers about her. No one talked to her any more, not even a respectful, fearful nod as they passed each other in town. She had seen a young mother scoot her daughter away from Leah that day – a particularly deep cut. Leah had once dandled that child on her knee.

She returned home, slowly, lost in her thoughts, to find Bran was in her kitchen, dressed in his fine clothes. He had returned today, from another mysterious trip. He smiled at her, scratched her neck. “Hello, beautiful,” he said, a word she had noticed he only used when she was in her wolf form. No matter, Leah liked it as much, particularly from him.

She rubbed her face against his wool trousers and then trotted off to her room to Change. She left the door open, as a trust had long been between them and she did not feel threatened by his presence when she was at her most vulnerable.

She dressed informally, leaving off her stays and wearing an old, comfortable dress, not bothering to pull on her stockings, too. She knew she would only be undressing again.

Bran had poured her and himself some tea. “I brought you some sugar,” he said. “Last time I was here, I saw you were out.”

Leah bit her lip – sugar was one of her economies, something she could do without – and then accepted the cup of tea and sat opposite him at her table. “Thank you. That’s very kind.” 

“I rode back through Great Falls so I have a little something else for you.”

From his pocket, he produced a little velvet bag and passed it to her. Leah took it with a sense of foreboding, now fully chewing her bottom lip. Whatever was in this bag, surely jewelry from the weight of it, she would have to sell. Not now, no, in a few years when perhaps he might have forgotten.

Feeling sorrier for herself than she’d ever really felt before – and over such a trifling thing! – she turned the bag over in her hand, wondering at the little trinket he would have brought her. “I have to tell you something.”

“Indeed?” Bran’s expression was lightly curious. He sipped his tea.

“I was wrong, before. I— people in town know, about us now, and… it is more difficult than I imagined.”

Bran put down his tea. “Are they disrespecting you?” he said in warning tones.

Part of Leah wanted to say that was the case, to sic Bran on them, her own personal vengeance. “Not to my face,” she admitted, honestly. “It’s more— much of the way things are done here is through an exchange of goods and the women, it turns out, are the ones who control what is exchanged.”

He nodded. “Yes, that is usually the way.”

“So, I need to find a little work, I think. Whilst this settles,” Leah added, trying to imbue her words with confidence. Good, honest work, that would bring in an income. She had a passing concern that if the women in this town would not deign to exchange flour for her milk, then they would not take kindly to the thought of paying for her skills as a seamstress.

It was a bridge she would have to cross when she came to it.

Bran tilted his head to the side. “I could still speak to them. Many of these women are married to my wolves. They have to obey me.”

Leah squirmed uncomfortably on her seat. She both _wanted_ him to do this and very much didn’t. Respect wouldn’t be won by him enforcing it. She might not be the sharpest mind but she knew that. “No,” she said quietly, turning the little velvet bag over in her hand. She tugged at the string and tipped the contents into her hand.

Bemused, she stared at her wedding ring, her mother’s necklace and the little pearl brooch. “I— these are…” A variety of thoughts crossed her mind. Had he seen these things and thought to buy them for her? A coincidence of some kind? Then she thumbed the wedding ring. No, surely not.

Tag, she thought. “Tag told you,” she said, the flush of mortification blooming up her face.

“Here’s what I think we shall do,” he murmured, closing her hand over her jewelry. “You will buy what you need at the general store and the bill will be sent to me.”

Leah cringed, thinking only of how this would appear.

“No, you are my mate. It is only right, Leah. You are my responsibility.” Carefully, he pried her fingers open again. He touched the wedding band. “Alternatively, we could marry.”

“Because of gossips and busybodies?” Leah shook her head, suppressing the briefest of visions of them standing before God and making vows. “No. And it was not our agreement.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “No. But this,” he gestured between the two of them, “was also not our agreement.”

Leah grumbled. “It’s an enjoyable benefit, however.”

This made him laugh, which lightened the tone. “I certainly think so. So you agree?”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Good. Drink your tea. Then come to bed.”

*

Samuel’s wife died, taking their unborn child with them, just as word reached them that a much anticipated war finally broke out between the Union states and the Confederates. In his grief, and against his father’s edicts, Samuel broke with the pack and left to join the army. Bran was furious.

“It’s not our war,” he spat at her as he paced her bedroom.

Leah lay under the covers where he had left her, half dozing. This was not the first time she had heard this one-sided argument. Sam had been gone for nearly three weeks and they had heard nothing from him. Bran’s personal feelings about the Confederate ethos aside – she knew he ultimately felt humans killing humans was something they could all benefit from. She could understand that.

“Come back to bed,” she said.

He paced some more. “I’m too restless.”

“Then expend that restlessness _here_.”

Bran smirked and prowled across the bed, pinning her in place. “You truly don’t care?”

“About the war? Or Samuel?”

“I know your feelings about my son,” he said damningly.

Leah shrugged. No, she did not like Samuel. Their personalities did not work well together and she despised his rampant desire to get children on women who would only suffer for it. But it was a topic she knew well to avoid with Bran, who saw things differently. “I agree with you, it’s not our war. And Samuel is as old as you are,” she said, for she knew her mate’s past now as well as he knew her own. Many thought Samuel only a few decades older than Charles, not a mere few decades younger than his father. “He can make his own decisions. _You_ need to train our new Second.”

For Charles, sullen, terrifyingly powerful Charles, had stepped into his older brother’s boots.

Bran chuffed a breath over the top of her head and then settled himself down, lying heavily over her like a dog, or a wolf, would. “He’s doing fine.”

“He’s terrifying everyone.”

“That’s the job. I remember meeting the Second in your pack.”

True but Arnold did not have the magic that was in Charles’s bones. She had seen him do things – not just the faster Change – that no werewolf should be able to do. Just like his father, she thought, smoothing a hand over his sandy hair. “It’s nearly dawn. You should go,” she said, the disappointment that he would agree to this already filling her.

Bran nodded. He raised himself off her body. “I shall see you tonight?” This was posed as a question, though they both knew it was unlikely Leah would miss the full moon run, the additional reason for Bran’s restlessness.

“You shall.”

He kissed her goodbye and jumped from the bed, pulling on the pack bonds to make his Change faster. She watched, dispassionately, as her mate transformed, bones clicking into place. He was silent, as if it didn’t hurt him, and then he shook himself in his wolf form, chuffed again to her, licked her big toe, and trotted off.

Leah did not lay a-bed for much longer. As well as her usual chores – feeding the animals, cleaning out their pens, and sweeping and washing her floors – she was making sweet rolls from a receipt in a magazine for that night’s pack run and they required two proves. Whilst they were proving, she also had work to do in her garden.

Groaning – a restless Bran meant she got little sleep – Leah tumbled herself from bed.

At that night’s meeting, there was much talk about gold, as gold camps and settlements were appearing almost daily and prospectors were arriving by wagon, stagecoach, horseback, steamboat, and even by foot, in search of their fortunes. It had been a hard winter, and many of these men had arrived ill prepared and become desperate. Bran warned that the roads surrounding these settlements were subject to lawlessness, of gangs of men killing indiscriminately. One or two of their wolves had been victims of such – surviving only because of their wolf spirits. The humans of their pack would not be so lucky.

What was more, Bran was keen to preserve the land around Aspen Creek. If there was gold, he did not want anyone to discover it. And he didn’t want gold fever to spread through his people, though Leah personally knew of a few young human men who had already left their homes to seek their fortunes.

Within their small community, the reaction to the unusual arrangement between the Marrok and his mate ebbed and flowed. There were a few stalwart disapprovers, wives of some of Bran’s more long-term wolves, but increasingly Leah was finding most turned a blind eye. It helped that they both maintained some relative discretion. For the most part, Leah was back to respectful nodding terms, though she did not think she would ever form friendships with these women.

No matter. They were human. They would fade soon enough.

There were now two other female werewolves in Aspen Creek. A German woman, Johanna, an unrelentingly plump and cheerful personage who lowered her eyes respectfully whenever Leah engaged with her, and an irritating sprite called Helena.

Helena bothered Leah. They were more or less a match in dominance, that strange sensation of hierarchy that every werewolf had, but Helena was also darkly pretty and more than one person had commented on her likeness to the Marrok’s late wife and mate. Indeed, one of his Alpha’s had mistaken her initially for Blue Jay woman and Leah had seen her mate look truly stricken. That stricken look had followed Leah for weeks afterwards.

Uncomfortably, Leah recognized in herself that sin of jealousy but she appeared to be unable to do anything about it. She gritted her teeth and watched out of the corner of her eye as Bran spoke to Helena. Were his eyes warm with affection? Too warm? What did that pat on her arm mean? Was Helena, unmated and unmarried, perhaps smiling flirtatiously up at Bran? Did she have designs on him, knowing that his union with Leah was ‘just’ a mating?

Bran was bemused when, helpless, she interrogated him about his intentions. “Why would I complicate my life with _another_ woman?” he teased.

This was the wrong tactic. At her flare of fury, Bran responded with one of his own. He caught her wrist as she spun away to storm off. “Come now, Leah. You are my mate. You must know it would be impossible.” He raised his eyebrows. “Particularly after all this time.”

She didn’t know what he meant by that. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“My wolf would never let me be with another, now,” he confirmed.

Leah frowned so heavily it felt as if her eyebrows touched her hairline. “He wouldn’t?”

Bran tugged her close and then pinched her chin, not gently. “No.”

She was consoled by this, by the truth she could taste in his words. She let him kiss her, let him slide her clothes from her body and swallow the noises she made helplessly as he brought her pleasure. Only after, sweat cooling on her body as she watched him dress, did it occur to her that the wolf and the man were not as one on all things. “What if you wanted to?” she asked.

Bran glanced at her dismissively. “Do not ask questions when you won’t like the answer.” 

Chastised, and hurt, Leah curled back into herself. Bran controlled the wolf, not the other way around. If he truly wanted to, she supposed, if there was another woman he desired, Bran could have her. He cared not for Leah’s feelings on the matter.

She pulled the blanket up past her nose, so he could not see her face. He did not kiss her goodbye when he left.

*

Leah was cruel to Helena. And for the first time, she saw that the power she had always considered to be Bran’s was also her own. She was the Marrok’s mate, so when she cut Helena, other women followed. And where their women followed, so did their husbands, the men of the pack.

Bran was furious. “Don’t you see your hypocrisy?” he demanded of her.

She did not. “That’s different,” Leah claimed, because it was – to her. “I don’t like her. She seeks you out too frequently.”

“You neither know her or have tried to know her. And she seeks me out because you have ensured she has no other recourse. I _forbid_ you from continuing this behavior, Leah.”

It was the second time Bran had forbidden her such, had forced his power upon her, and once again it was over a woman.

 _So be it_.

Bran’s edict was that she ceased her behavior towards Helena but he had not been specific so Leah simply ignored her and felt as if she was obeying her Alpha. This infuriated Bran more and he ceased all communication, physical or verbal, with her, the chill of his disapproval seeping through the pack. Few could interfere in the situation. Charles made it clear he would stay out of what he considered to be his father’s ‘marital woes’ and there wasn’t a chance in heck Tag would broach the topic with either of them. Instead, Tag gave her a mildly disappointed look that burned Leah almost as badly as Bran’s frigid silence.

Eventually, Helena herself resolved the situation. She requested she be moved to one of his other packs. She did this at the full moon meeting, standing before Bran, her head lowered and her hands shaking. Several pairs of eyes swung to Leah and then away again.

Leah had won but it was not a win she relished. Bran did not speak to her, still, and obviously regretted Helena’s loss. Females made a pack more balanced and he did not want to lose her. Indeed, he tried to convince her to stay, furthering Leah’s fury.

Eventually, Bran gave in. He sent Charles with Helena to a pack in California and _still_ he did not come to her. By the time Charles had returned, stinking of blood his father had requested he spilled on the way, Leah had begun to doubt herself.

Had she overreacted? She would never have considered herself a person who ‘overreacted’. She tried to recall moments during her human marriage, now decades in her past, when she might have been jealous of another woman’s attentions towards her husband, but she could not think of any.

She felt unsure, now. Was it possible she was going mad?

Bran was unapproachable. He had built a cold wall of fury against her and she was too afraid to attempt to breach it. Perhaps that was it, she thought miserably. He would never come to her again. She had broken their agreement, nebulous as it had been.

She reread the magazines he had brought her as gifts, now worn with age, and sniffled piteously. She avoided the pack gatherings and took herself off on her own runs. In church, she arrived late and slipped into the back, keeping her head down.

It was Charles, of all people, who came to offer her advice, finally breaking his long-held rule of interfering with their mating. He put a jug of ale on her table, a gift. “You’re both as stubborn as each other. Just apologize to him. He will forgive you.”

Then Charles lifted his dark eyebrows at her. “I presume, of course, that you have come to your senses on the matter?” he said, talking to her as if she was the child and not his senior by several decades.

Leah could only lift her eyes as far as his chin, a complication of emotions roaring inside of her. She wanted to throw the stoneware jug at his head. She wanted to cry. She wanted to beg him to speak to his father for her. “I have… regrets,” she admitted, an admission that felt as if she was biting off her own fingers.

“So apologize. We all have to do it sometime. It’s better to get it over and done with quickly. He _wants_ to forgive you.” Charles shrugged and left her, his duty done.

Leah warred with herself, even as she rolled her freshly washed hair in papers that night, as she brushed out the dirt from the hem of her best dress. In the morning, she gave herself a sponge bath with lavender scented water and then pinned up her curled hair. She put on her mother’s necklace that Bran had bought back for her and made her way to his house.

Now that Charles and Sam were gone, it was a big house for just one man. The front yard was untidy, too. Samuel had been the one to tend to the herb garden and the small vegetable patch and in his absence, Bran had let it grow wild. She picked some mint to chew and, using the mating bond, walked around the back of the house to where Bran was working. He was making a bed frame, she thought, and stood only in his trousers, his hair damp with sweat.

He knew she was there, of course, but he continued sawing and hammering as she nervously swayed from foot to foot, trying to build up the courage to speak.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, thinking of Charles’s advice. “I’m very sorry.”

For a wild moment, she thought he perhaps hadn’t heard anything. He took a nail from his mouth and hammered it into the wood. Her heart beat loudly.

Then Bran put the hammer down and crouched to inspect the joint he was making. “Why are you sorry?” he asked, neutrally.

She swallowed. She had prepared, a little, for this. “For the way I treated Helena. For disobeying the spirit of your order, if not the letter,” she said, in an increasingly smaller voice.

Bran nodded at this. He stood and picked up another nail, his hammer. “You did disobey me.”

His words made her shiver. She would be punished, for this. Formally. She knew that. She clenched her hands together and as she did so, felt the little nugget of wood she had brought with her. She had been taught to whittle as a child, a hobby her father had given her, for he had wanted a boy and her mother had only given him a daughter. It wasn’t a hobby she had given much time to but evenings and nights without Bran had been lonely and quiet and filled with time.

Very slowly, she approached him. Not close – this was a dangerous, angry werewolf and she wasn’t stupid – but close enough so that when she put down the little figure she knew he would be able to see it.

Leah stepped back quickly and waited a while. When Bran made no move to pick up the figure, to speak, she fidgeted a little, unsure if she should go. She had done what she had come to do and, disappointingly, it was too little and too late. He liked her no more, if he had ever liked at her at all.

He began hammering again, the little wolf figure she had painstakingly carved in his image balanced on the plank of wood he was using as a table wobbling precariously.

She slunk home, the feeling that she had lost something significant a miserable weight upon her shoulders. Fat tears rolled down her face as she undressed and put away her best dress. She climbed into bed, aware that she had things to do, and sobbed. She was stupid and selfish and had made a mess of something she hadn’t realized she cherished above everything. She wondered, wildly, if perhaps she could go to the pack in California, bring Helena back. Try to make amends in some way.

But she knew it was impossible. Leah had lost him.

Her tears eventually ran out and though she lay stupefied on her bed for many minutes afterwards, she knew she had almost a full day ahead of her and couldn’t spend it lying down.

Putting on a summer-weight brown cotton dress – another gift from Bran, she thought mournfully – she tended her hungry animals, cleaned out their pens. A fox had clearly tried to get into her chicken coop again, surely a suicidal creature, and she mended the damage as best she could. The only true solution would be to sit outside as her wolf and await the creature, chase him off her territory, which was a deeply tedious task as Leah’s wolf wasn’t particularly sedentary.

She collected her eggs and faux-brightly congratulated her hens on being good layers, despite the nightly attempts on their lives. She felt, rather than heard, Bran’s amusement. Clutching her basket to herself, she watched as he tramped his way through the undergrowth to her. He had taken the longer route. He had put on a shirt. There was sawdust in his hair.

Leah’s heart, a wounded thing, swooped wildly in her chest.

Bran held up his hand, the little figurine between his fingers. “I didn’t know you could carve.”

She nodded, speechless.

He stopped, a yard from her, and turned the figure over in his hands, stroking his thumb over the little figure’s head, tilted high to howl at the moon. “You’ve even given it fur.”

“It’s supposed to be you,” she said quietly. “See the tail?”

Her mate – for he was still her mate – smiled faintly. “I see it now.”

Swallowing around the large lump in her throat. “I— when my husband and I argued, we would… when we apologized, we would give gifts. I always gave him a carving.” She slanted her eyes downwards. “He had many little animals, by the end. I completed the Ark, twice over.”

His amusement, a balm, rippled over her again. “You don’t often mention him.”

“You don’t often mention her.”

“It hurts too much.”

She closed her eyes, briefly. She supposed for Bran his mate’s death was still comparatively recent and he had not had even part of a lifetime with her. “I remember that. It lessens, over time. But never goes away.”

For a moment, their eyes met, in brief understanding. Then Bran’s expression cooled. He put the carving in his pocket. “I shall have to punish you. You disobeyed me and caused disruption in our pack. It cannot be thought that your disapproval can force a good werewolf from us. And that I will let you.”

Leah looked at her eggs. “Yes, Bran.”

“I do acknowledge I am partly responsible. We are in an unusual situation. And your _upset_ ,” he said, making it clear that was not the word he truly wanted to use, “surprised me. I will not make that mistake again.”

Though it felt like she was being chastised – for he was certainly doing that – Leah started to feel like there was a light at the end of the tunnel. His boots came into her field of vision and she glanced up at him. He was stern-faced, still. “You were wrong, Leah,” he told her.

She nodded. “Yes, Bran.”

“You were wrong to treat her so, in precisely the way you despaired of others treating you.” Her eyes prickled with shame. “You were wrong not to trust me, too.”

“I didn’t know I could trust you,” Leah murmured, not quite in defense of her actions. But nearly.

“Your wolf knows. You should listen to her.” He put his hand to her face, forcing her to look at him. “Do you need me to make you promises? Would words help you?”

She sighed. “Probably not,” Leah admitted. “I don’t think it’s a rational emotion.”

Bran smiled then and she bathed in its warmth. “At least you know that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, again.

“I know.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “You will not like your punishment.”

*

The lengthy apology letter to Helena took three weeks for Leah to write. For one, she wrote poorly and Bran insisted on giving her ‘lessons’ to improve her writing. For another, those ‘lessons’ frequently deteriorated into other, more pleasurable activities as they made up for lost time. 

The dress Leah made for Helena took less time than the heartfelt letter. Bran had produced an eye-wateringly expensive silk and Leah had sewn the lengths together with envy. The punishment was made all the more galling as Leah suspected he had bought the silk for her and instead she was creating an extravagant gift for another woman with it. She trimmed the collar and sleeves with lace and then held it out for Bran’s inspection.

“Well?” she asked, testily.

“A fine gift,” he told her, smiling at the resentment on her face.

Tag was the one who was instructed to take the gift to California this time, to her surprise. “I think Charles has had enough of California for now,” was all Bran said on the subject. She imagined this had something to do with the blood she had seen his son beating from his clothes after his return previously. Neither of them spoke of the work Charles carried out for Bran but she knew, for she had seen it, that Charles was an excellent killer.

Samuel returned and with him a newfound desire to learn all there was about mending the human – and werewolf – body. He spoke not of the atrocities he had seen during the war, perhaps because his father still sneered when he heard of it, but he was much changed, from Leah’s perspective. Quieter, more thoughtful, though still with a biting tongue that he used on her frequently. He did not seek to return to his place at his father’s side, instead asked for and received permission to remain a lone wolf in his father’s territory.

Samuel did not stay with them long. He successfully applied to the medical school in Massachusetts where he could learn more than from books and what he had gleaned from the battlegrounds. This time, the pack saw him off with real fanfare, Bran hosting the festivities at his house and Leah making sure that drink and food was free-flowing. She might not have cared for Samuel but making sure the pack was content increasingly gave Leah pleasure in a way that she would have never imagined. Perhaps she had learned her lesson from Helena. Disrupting the pack gave her no joy. It was her family now.

The night ended as it always did with a run and Leah fell asleep with Bran in his bed, waking late in the morning with a jerk.

“What is it?” her mate mumbled against her back.

“I’m… _here_ ,” Leah whispered, urgently. She could hear someone in the kitchen. Sam, perhaps. She had never slept through the night in Bran’s bed. The rare occasions she had been with him, in his house, she had made sure to leave before dawn, just as he did when he stayed with her.

“Mmm, so you are.” A hand slipped between her legs, his mouth pressed to the top of her spine. Leah felt his arousal at the small of her back, his want through the press of the mating bond.

“Bran,” she hissed. The walls were thin.

“It’s not as if he doesn’t know.” Bran coaxed her onto her back, kissing his way around her neck. A persuasive hand ran down from her knee, nudging her legs apart and her need for him throbbed at the apex of her thighs. She spread her legs and he hummed as she let him ease his way inside her, whispering in Welsh. She enjoyed it when he spoke to her in another tongue, even if she didn’t understand it. Such was the frequency that he used Welsh when they were in bed together that she regularly had an amorous response to it at the most inconvenient of times. Mostly, when he was shouting at their people and he would slip into Welsh to get a better grip on his anger and she would find herself having to clench her legs together. He thought this was particularly amusing.

Thus Leah, wearing the previous evening’s clothes and smelling like Bran had tumbled her several times, saw off Samuel with his father. Samuel’s face wrestled between amusement and filial disgust. 

Whilst Bran was checking the horses, she handed Samuel her gift which, admittedly, she had charged to his father’s account at the general store. It was a set of stationary and some handkerchiefs, his initials neatly embroidered in the corner. “Write. Often,” she said, with not a little threat. “Your father would like it as you will be very far away.”

Samuel turned the gift over, a small very Bran-like smile about his mouth. “Thank you, Leah,” he said quietly. “I shall do so.” He tucked it away into his saddle bag. “Take care of him.”

She nodded. “I will.”

*

The 19th Century rolled into the 20th with alarming speed and Leah found herself a werewolf for over a century with very little fanfare. For much of that, she had lived in Aspen Creek, been mated to Bran and with the exception of when he was away, warmed his bed or he warmed hers. It was a comfortable existence. She was as happy as her personality would ever allow her to be.

“Hotels?” Bran asked, as he, Leah and Charles ate a meal together. This was a rarity and Leah had spent most of the meal biting her tongue, lest the dark eyes of Bran’s son turn on her.

“Yes. If the aeroplane truly becomes the success I believe it will be, people will be able to travel between states faster and easier than ever before. And they will need comfortable, well-serviced accommodation, not just the luxury hotels you might find in New York, but something more accessible for normal people.”

Leah had read about the Wright brothers ‘machine that flies’ in the newspaper. It seemed terrifying and unlikely, but then she had felt the same way about the arrival of the locomotive. More than twenty years before, Bran had taken her to Butte to watch the first train arrive there, carrying forty passengers as well as machinery and oil, all the way from Utah. A nearly three-week-long journey in a stagecoach reduced to just one full day. It seemed impossible. 

For the last fifty or sixty years, Charles and Bran had invested money in copper mining and the railway had served those investments well. The copper mines in the area were booming but now Charles wanted to diversify. And Leah knew as well as being terrifying, he was also terrifyingly clever. His father listened to his advice, took it extremely seriously.

The Cornicks, Leah knew, were well on their way to becoming very wealthy. Not that you would know it. Bran still lived in the house he had always lived in, albeit with a few improvements suggested by Leah herself, who avidly read all about the developments in modern living in her magazines. A bathroom now replaced what had once been Charles bedroom, removing the need for the outhouse. His kitchen featured a modern cooking range with a flat top that allowed food to be cooked at different temperatures. At Leah’s request, he employed one of the Wallace girls from the town, now, to clean and cook for him full time, but to the untrained eye, Bran still lived a simple life despite the money doubling in his bank account.

Within their own country, Bran’s packs were mostly in order, with he, Charles and a few others going out to monitor and manage where necessary. It was the unrest in Europe that was bothering Bran, now. One of their own kind, Jean Chastel, had been clawing his way through the packs of western Europe, a fact that had not bothered Bran much until reports began to make its way into the newspapers of mysterious savage deaths and bodies of young women, half-eaten.

“Publicity,” Bran growled. “Is dangerous.”

She didn’t care much about Europe – to her, it was far, far away, a collection of foreign countries with improbably long histories that held little consequence to her life – but Bran’s mind was always leaps and bounds ahead of hers. They would lie in bed together and he would whisper his thoughts, his eyes moving around the room as he brought the threads together. “One day they will know us for what we are. Do we truly want what they know to be him? That monster and his depravity? We will be hunted to extinction.”

With wide eyes, she listened to him describing this possible, terrible future. In Aspen Creek, Leah had never much cared for secrecy. Everyone in their small town was either a werewolf or related to one. But Bran had encouraged George, shortly after he was Changed, to start breeding big dogs.

“It won’t be long before the automobile replaces the horse up here,” Bran claimed at a pack meeting to his agog audience. “And that means more people and more traffic. We can’t risk someone seeing a wolf twice the size of a normal one and run screaming for their guns and silver bullets.”

It had seemed only yesterday that their biggest worries had been vampires. Leah had never imagined humans – with their puny little weapons – would ever be a problem. Prolific as they were.

She pressed her thumbs into the back of Bran’s neck as he sat at the table each morning, the newspapers spread out in front of him. “You worry so much,” she murmured. It seemed to be all he did at the moment.

“I need to go to France,” he finally announced one day, his chin dropped to his chest as she worked on the knots in his shoulders.

Her heart sank. “So far,” Leah whispered. It would be the furthest he had gone since they had been mated. Would she even be able to feel him at that distance? Her distant awareness of Bran comforted her when they were apart but France was, to her, on the other side of the world.

“You could come with me. In fact, you should.”

“To France?” Leah stopped what she was doing and dropped down into the chair adjacent, too stunned to continue.

“You seem shocked.”

“It’s, oh, well… it’s very far away.” That was not what was at the root of her shock, no indeed. It was that he had suggested it. He had never taken her on any of his trips. And… this was more than a trip. It was travel. It was an entire other continent.

But she would do it. She would do it because the thought of being apart from him was more frightening. Leah smiled. “It would be an adventure.”

Bran studied her for a while. “Adventure is good for the soul.” He reached out and touched her face, the barest brush of his fingers. Then his fingers curled together, his hand dropping to a fist on the table as if touching her burned him. “I shall speak to Charles. It will be a test for him, too.”

Of course. They would be leaving the pack in Charles’s hands for the first time. “Perhaps Samuel could come back for a while,” she suggested, almost hesitantly. Bran did not often take her suggestions regarding his sons terribly well. He always said that she had ‘ulterior’ motives, as indeed she often did. Like now.

“Not a bad idea. I shall send him a telegram. Charles is not too proud to deny himself the additional support.”

That was true. One thing the Cornicks did not have was an excess of pride. Something she could not say the same of herself. Pride. Jealousy. She was really adding to her list of sins.

But then Leah was no longer certain she believed in God any more.

*

“Oh dear,” Bran said, frowning at her as she gaped at her surroundings, “I fear I have spoiled you for normal living.”

The SS _La Touraine_ was, for Leah, an unimaginable luxury, piled upon the luxury of the equally unimaginable hotel they had stayed in New York. It had _electricity._ And hot and cold running water.

What’s more, whilst Bran had been ensconced with the three Alphas that headed the packs of the New York state, Leah had availed herself of the kind of shopping she could only dream of, equipping herself with ready-made clothing that would be suitable for her destination of Paris, the chicest capital of the world.

She would be damned if she would appear as some kind of backwards, country hick.

Their stateroom on board was equipped with a bed, a basin-cum-bar, and a chaise. It became rapidly obvious to Leah that she should have had a lady’s maid, instead she had to manage with her mate.

“We are, ah, obviously married,” he said to her, as he helped do up the tiny buttons at the back of her dress.

She had seen their papers. Mrs. Leah Cornick. “Obviously,” she replied, carefully adjusting the neckline. The kind of formalwear she had purchased for the six-day journey was distinctly more revealing and _tighter_ than anything she might have worn in Aspen Creek. Such delicate fabrics would never have survived the walk from her house to Bran’s. Her elbow-length white satin gloves would have barely survived her _house_.

She felt positively naked.

Bran eyed the expanse of her white collarbone and the discrete view of cleavage. “This is… very nice,” he said, haltingly. He gestured to his neck. “Is there, perhaps, some kind of shawl?”

She plucked a piece of gauze from the dresser. He winced. Leah sympathized. She had been prepared by the ladies magazines whose preposterous fashion plates had implied just how scantily clad ladies evening fashions were in cities. “I know. It’s… a bit much.”

“I suppose it’s very fashionable,” he suggested, sounding doubtful.

Bran escorted her to dinner where they were expected to dine with the other first class guests and, mid appetizer, leaned towards her and whispered, “I take it back. You are comparatively fully clothed.”

She giggled and clutched his shoulder as the ship rolled alarmingly. “Oh, will it do that all the time?”

“Believe me, this is significantly better than the journey I took _to_ America.”

Leah would have to take his word for it. Later, in the small bed, the side of which drew up like a child’s crib, she lay with his arm pinned around her, feeling the ship toss and turn beneath them, wide awake.

“Frightened?” he asked her.

She scoffed. “No,” she lied.

Bran nuzzled her ear. “Shall I distract you?”

“See if you can!”

He did his best and, unsurprisingly, Leah found her rest once he had exercised both their libidos. She woke feeling surprisingly fresh and not at all ill, as many of the other gentlemen’s wives did. The breakfast table was significantly emptier compared to their first night and Leah broke her fast with a feast.

“I must congratulate your wife on her sea legs,” the Captain said to them, as they perambulated around the upper deck, which was all the exercise they were to get on this journey.

“Should I be offended,” Leah said, smiling forcefully as they continued on their way. The wind was strong and she had one hand clutched to her wide-brimmed hat, a concoction that was not designed for Trans-Atlantic crossings.

“No. Though I did not enjoy the way he looked at your bosom,” Bran admitted, glancing over his shoulder with a flash of amber eyes.

It was the most time they had ever spent with each other and in such close quarters. Leah admitted this taste of what it might be like to live together was useful. She had – fleetingly – wondered what would happen if one day he lost his mind and suggested she stay with him permanently and she was satisfied that this was not the case as they both were very well set in their ways. She felt they managed each other tolerably, however. When he grew testy, he took himself off to one of the men’s lounging areas and read a book. When she grew crotchety, she took herself off for tea. And small sandwiches and cakes. She felt she got the better end of the bargain.

Leah was relieved when they finally reached Le Havre, though it was deeply strange to step on dry land. “Sea legs?” she asked Bran, as she stood still and felt like the world was tilting around her.

“Yes. Now you need to find your land legs,” he replied. His eyes were scanning the crowd. “Ah. There we are.”

A man stepped forward and bowed. “Marrok.”

“Juste. May I introduce my wife, Leah,” Bran said properly, gesturing to her. “Leah, this is Juste, he belongs to the Normandy pack.”

She had never been introduced thusly. Leah inclined her head as Juste bowed to her.

“I have transport ready, sire.” Juste gestured to the porters who had heaved their trunks from the ship with such red-faces and perspiration that Leah had been tempted to offer to help.

The roads were a mixture of stagecoaches and private carriages, with more automobiles – the double-decked street trollies as well as the small vehicles – than Leah had seen in New York. France, Juste explained, not without pride, was the biggest manufacturer of automobiles in Europe.

“Is it your first time in France, _madame_?” Juste asked her in his softly accented English.

“My first time in Europe,” Leah responded stoutly, not even looking away from the window as she took it all in. She was afraid she appeared the quintessential rube but couldn’t seem to stop herself. It felt like another world. It _was_ another world.

Bran and Juste began to talk business, her mate switching to French like he was a native. Bran had done his best to equip Leah with a little French but there had not been time for Leah to develop more than the basic greetings and niceties. Leah wasn’t without language skills – she had grown up speaking Dutch, then her first pack had been mostly Spanish-speaking and of course English. She had a little German too but for one reason or another French had slipped past her.

She listened with half an ear, but otherwise split her time between observing what was outside her window and the enjoyable sound of the conversation between her mate and Juste. Like Leah, Bran was dressed more formally than he might have done at home – head to toe in tweed, holding his felt hat loosely in his hands. His new shoes were shined to a mirror-like polish and – he claimed – very slippery. He looked very smart and very handsome. 

Bran slanted his eyes to her briefly, somehow knowingly, and she quickly looked away. He could not possibly know what she was thinking. He had assured her of this time and time again. It was just that she had a very transparent face.

Biting her lip, Leah resolved to stare out of the window until they reached Paris.

*

Like the two nights they had spent in New York, in Paris they would stay in a hotel. She knew Bran usually stayed with his Alphas when he travelled but Europe was different. Though he had connections from old – good and bad, by all accounts – they would not be able to stay with one of the French Alphas.

“It would just tick Chastel off more,” he assured her, as they were escorted to their room in the _Grand Hotel du Louvre_.

The hotel staff milled around them, unpacking their trunks. Once again, Leah received the impression that it was unusual for a woman of her apparent wealth to be travelling without a lady’s maid. So too was it strange that Bran had no valet.

She decided to ignore this – they could pretend this was the American way – and ordered coffee and delicacies the hotel considered appropriate accompaniments, to be enjoyed in the living area of their luxurious suite. She had a separate bedroom to Bran, which she was grateful for after their close confines of the last few days, and she stood for some time looking out of the window, at Paris, the most romantic city in the world.

“That’s the _Musee du Louvre_ ,” Bran told her, as the tea arrived and they dismissed the servants.

She nodded and poured the coffee for Juste and Bran. “I read about it in the guidebook. Do you think… I know we are not here on a vacation,” indeed, Leah had never had a ‘vacation’, “but will we be able to see it? I would like to.”

“I should think that can be arranged. By all accounts Chastel will arrive tomorrow, which I think we can assume means he arrived yesterday? And so will be watching us,” Bran enquired of their French associate as Leah doctored Juste’s coffee and handed it to him. She did the same for Bran. It smelled amazing.

Juste’s lips quirked. “Indeed, sire.”

“A trip to the museum might be the perfect distraction, then,” Bran said with a smile to Leah.

Pleased she had got her way, Leah helped herself to some of the delicious coffee, heavily doctoring it with sugar.

In English, this time, Bran and Juste discussed the plans for the first meeting with the monster Jean Chastel. There would be an elegant dinner, it seemed, where threats would be exchanged over fine wines. As Chastel’s mate would be present, Leah would also attend – indeed this had been part of the reason Bran had wanted her with him. Women, he said, made things _look_ more civilized.

“What is she like? His mate?” Leah wanted to know as she nibbled on a tiny, pretty cake.

“Quiet. Cowed.” Juste’s demeanor became saddened. “I would steal yourself, _madame_ , to be quite shocked.”

Revolted by this prospect, Leah sat back and sipped her coffee. She was a little tired, though she had found her land legs once more and the world no longer felt as if it was moving.

“Juste will stay in the hotel and I have another friend coming from Britain, he should arrive tonight,” Bran said, once Juste had left them to freshen up after their travels. Once again, he helped her with the multitude of small hooks and eyes at the back of her day dress. “I imagine the hotel would provide you with a maid to help, if you’d rather.”

Leah smiled widely at his eyes in the reflection of the gilt mirror. “No, indeed, I much prefer you to undress me.”

He grinned back. “Shall we have a nap?” he suggested as she stepped out of the dress.

‘Nap’ was a euphemism, not unexpectedly, but Leah found herself drifting off to sleep afterwards nevertheless. The mattress was like a cloud. “Don’t let me miss the museum,” she murmured as her eyes closed.

“I’ll wake you,” Bran whispered to her, brushing her hair back from her face.

True to his word, he woke her what felt like only a few minutes later and she blinked at him, disorientated. “Oh, _Paris_ ,” she said, sitting upright. She was missing _Paris_.

“Don’t wash too much,” he said, confusingly, as she clambered out of bed and headed to yet another extremely modern bathroom.

Leah rinsed her face. “Oh? Oh,” she said, understanding. “Will we really be followed? Surely not by Chastel?”

“Entirely, and probably. You are, by all accounts, very much his type.”

She leaned backwards to look at him. Bran was already dressed and lounging on her bed. “His type?”

“Female.”

“Ah. How delightful.” Leah narrowed her eyes at her reflection and planned what weapons to wear on her person.

*

The Mona Lisa was very small, Leah thought. And underwhelming.

Bran tilted his head. “I met Da Vinci, once. At an inn in Venice.” With that off-hand statement, he escorted her on, Leah trying – but failing – to get any more details from him. He just kept shaking his head and repeating, “I don’t really remember.”

“You _forgot_ Leonardo Da Vinci.”

“I have forgotten many brilliant men and women, it seems.” He patted her arm. “Now, have you spotted our friend?”

“Yes, I think so,” she said, admiring the next painting.

A perfectly average looking werewolf had been on their tail for most of the afternoon. His hair under his bowler hat was mid-brown, his beard was several shades darker than his hair and close-trimmed. She thought he had grey eyes, though she had been determinedly not looking long enough to make it clear she had seen him.

“Is that him?” She knew better than to sound surprised. Most who met Bran thought him unassuming, because that was what he wanted them to think. She wondered if Chastel was witch-born too.

“Indeed. What would you like to do tomorrow?” Bran held up a finger. “Wait. Let me guess. More shopping.”

She pressed her lips together. “It’s not often one has the opportunity to shop in _Paris_.”

He grunted. “We will have to buy more luggage, I think.”

After the museum, Bran took her to a café for more coffee and he struck up conversation in French, seemingly quite casually, with a man seated near them whom five minutes into the conversation, Leah belatedly realized wasn’t human. Nor was he werewolf, she thought, sipping her cup of delicious coffee. She had met one or two fae, including their very own Jonesy, and she thought this one might smell a _little_ like fae. He was wearing dark glasses and had leather gloves on, despite the temperate Spring climate.

It took Leah too long to realize he only had four fingers on each hand. _A goblin_. She had never met one before and she stared at him openly, then. Many goblins could pass for human, indeed were it not for the faint smell of fae, she might not have noticed he wasn’t. 

They said their goodbyes to each other in French and the goblin took her hand and bowed over it, saying something that made Bran smile somewhat wistfully.

“What did he say? He was a goblin, wasn’t he?” she whispered as the man ambled away.

“He is.” Bran took a sip of his coffee. “I believe we just met a goblin king.”

“Did you know he would be here?” Was this a meeting?

Her mate affected a look of surprise that did not fool her. “No, indeed. But he apparently knew I would be. He is pulling his people out of Europe.”

“Because of Chastel?” She didn’t think werewolves would have much to do with goblins.

“No. Because war is coming.” Bran closed his eyes. “A bloody one.”

Leah had long learnt that the more frustrating her conversations were with Bran, the more he was undecided about the topic or, simply, the less he knew but didn’t want to admit to it. She let the bloody war go, filing it away for conversation to be had later, perhaps on their return journey.

“I’m famished,” he announced, lifting his fingers for the check. “I thought we would dine at the hotel tonight. The food is supposed to be exquisite.”

“Fine by me.” On the bridge, the average looking figure of the most dangerous werewolf in Europe – excluding her mate – leaned against the balustrade, watching them. “Will he join us, do you think?”

“No, more likely he will pretend to be civilized for another day. I think he believes he is being intimidating.”

Leah was intimidated. Both the stories about Chastel and the blatant way he was staring intimidated her. If she had been alone, she would have been afraid.

They paid and left. Bran looped her arm through his, casually, as if this way of walking and behaving in public was somehow normal for them. Back at home, they kept a respectable distance apart outside their homes. Here they were ‘married’. She was wearing her wedding ring. “You could take him,” he said, absurdly.

She laughed. “How flattering.”

“I’ve seen you, practicing with Tag. You could.”

Tag had long been introducing her to various fighting techniques for her two-legged form. On four legs, Leah was a natural fighter – she was quick and cunning and was confident she could take any female and perhaps some weaker male werewolves. On two legs, she was not so sure. She had been working on her shooting, using the handgun Bran had bought her, as well as some wickedly sharp knives. She preferred knives, in general. Bran called her bloodthirsty.

“Practicing is different than reality,” she murmured. Tag had taken her to meet Hester, just before they left for Europe. She had managed well enough but Hester had, eventually, wiped the floor with her before nodding and saying she had improved. Leah had not known she had been watching.

“That’s true. We shall have give you some more experience.”

Leah felt a flare of excitement. Bloodthirsty indeed.

*

The truth was, _love_ wasn’t really something Leah thought about. Somewhat inevitably, because they were in Paris, the most romantic city in the world, she found herself thinking of it a great deal. Away from the day to day mundaneness of their lives, walking hand-in-hand with her mate when all they had to do was eat and see the sights, Leah felt all the soft parts of herself unfold.

She did love him, she realized, as Bran helped her with her dress once more as they prepared for a meal with a werewolf she felt for sure he would happily execute in a heartbeat.

Not a quiet love, not like her human husband, whom she had found herself loving at the strangest of times – his big, gentle hands stroking the ears of their dog, the way he had rapped his knuckles on the table at the end of each meal, the soft, husky laugh.

No, Leah thought. This love for Bran, this great, dangerous man, was something different. Something brighter, sharper. Harder. Like she was, in this werewolf body. Underneath that shell of hardness, though, was a soft underbelly. A vulnerability she did not like. A vulnerability that said it was one-sided, this love.

For Bran did not love her. 

She knew he did not. Bran was a man who was free with his verbal affections. He loved his sons and he told them he loved them, frequently. He loved each and every member of their pack, no matter how difficult they were. She had seen him shed a tear when they left him and embrace them when they returned.

He was also a man of his word. Bran had agreed a bargain with her, one that would protect others from his wolf, and necessitated that their union be one without the kind of love he had for his first mate. When they had begun their sexual relationship, Bran had reiterated that bargain. It changed nothing between them. He was a werewolf man and sex was a basic need that she had _accepted_ was her duty to fulfill. That she enjoyed it too was beside the point. And whilst that might have seemed like a long time ago to Leah, to Bran, centuries older than she, it was no time at all.

“What is it?” Bran asked, catching her eye in the mirror.

“Nothing.” Leah shook her head, annoyed at her train of thought. She had been perfectly content until that moment. She needed to put such thoughts aside, else it consume her.

She picked up this evening’s necklace, a simple single strand of pearls that had been a Christmas present from Bran. Though she had chosen a dress with a slightly more modest neckline, it was still fashionable enough that her collarbone seemed to be a broad, naked expanse. Somehow dangling her white flesh in front of a man-eating monster seemed like a poor idea. “Could you put this on me?”

“Actually – I have something for you.” Bran jumped off her bed, where he had been lounging, reading her guide book whilst she finished getting ready. The hotel had provided her with a hair stylist, who had laboriously curled her hair using hot irons and then created such a hairstyle that Leah found herself constantly turning her head to the side, admiring it.

He returned with a plush box.

“Jewelry?” Leah smiled as she accepted it. He was generous with his gifts, always had been. With everyone, not just her. “When did you get this?”

“It is _astonishing_ what this hotel is willing to do for its guests.” Bran stuck his hands in his pockets. “Go on.”

Leah opened it and then promptly closed it. “Good grief, Bran,” she said, as a hot flush went through her.

He grinned, pleased with himself. “Charles tells me that it’s a very sensible investment.”

She risked another look inside the box, then closed it. Yes, diamonds. Lots of them. “I cannot possibly wear this,” she said, with every intention of doing so.

*

Throughout dinner, Chastel’s lovely mate had kept her meltingly brown eyes lowered, her golden hair artfully curled over one shoulder, her entire body angled towards Chastel like she was a flower and he was the sun.

She had appeared utterly submissive which meant most of the table discounted her. Leah had, too, until Aimee had stood to use the bathroom and Leah had seen the distinct outline of a pistol on her thigh. Perhaps she wouldn’t have noted it, had she not been wearing one herself.

A pistol on her thigh, a knife around her ankle and in her little bag, in fact.

From then onwards, Leah had watched Aimee more carefully, directing questions at her – all of which she responded to in heavily accented English with some vague, insipid response.

Leah watched as Chastel put food on her plate, instead of ordering her own meal. Not very much food, Leah thought, eating a piece of chicken so mouth-wateringly delicious that she wished she could order another. Did he want her weak? she wondered. 

The next time she stood to use the bathroom, Leah stood as well, the men bobbing up and down with them, as if they were gentlemen and not monsters. She smiled and followed Aimee to an absurdly ornate bathroom, complete with sitting area and large gilt mirrors.

To keep up the façade, Leah used the facilities and then emerged to find Aimee gently powdering her nose.

Leah followed suit, though her nose was not shiny. She watched, intrigued, as the woman followed this ritual with rouge on her lips and cheeks.

The little pot was offered to Leah. “Would you like to try?”

Leah took the pot. Curiously, she sniffed it. Rose oil. She applied a little to her cheeks. The effect was not unappealing as it made her eyes look bluer but it felt rather _risqué_ , as the French called it. “Thank you.”

The limpid brown eyes never lifted. “You are very welcome.”

“It’s a lovely evening,” Leah said, because, underlying threats aside, nothing had actually happened that could be construed as unpleasant.

“ _Oui,_ madame.”

“Have you eaten here before?” she asked.

“ _Non,_ madame.”

Seemingly waiting for Leah to make a move to leave, Aimee stood placidly, her hands folded in front of her. It was, quite possibly, the strangest behavior Leah had ever witnessed in another werewolf female. Were the weapons just for show?

Giving up, Leah returned to the table, Aimee on her heels. In their absence, the conversation at the table had grown remarkably more tense. And, more importantly, it was now in French and seemed to mostly be between Bran and Chastel.

Leah’s plate had been taken away. She picked up a piece of bread, broke it over the side plate, and tried to glean what was happening. Bran was getting angry but Chastel was angrier, or at least showing it.

The restaurant they had been taken to was owned by a werewolf and they were eating late, so the last human guests had left just as they had been served their _entrée_. They had been given a large, circular table on a raised platform at the back of the restaurant and a curtain had been drawn over to give them more privacy.

There was a door at the back of the room that presumably led to a storage room but Leah had noted Chastel’s eyes drifted to it more than once. She was the one who had been positioned in front of it and she had been aware of it throughout dinner.

On her right, the British werewolf – whom Bran had called ‘Chaucer’ but everyone else called James Bright – fidgeted. She glanced towards him and in that brief moment, _something_ , she could not say what, happened between Bran and Chastel.

The British werewolf moved so fast, sweeping Leah to the side in so smooth a motion she barely felt it. There was a loud crash as the table turned over, food and drink and glassware and cutlery flying everywhere and then Chastel flung Bran _through_ the door at the back of the room, splintering wood and glass.

He threw himself after Bran, the rest of their dining companions following and Leah – struggling from James Bright’s arms – dove after them.

*

The room beyond the restaurant was clearly an arena used for such fights. The walls were thick and plastered, painted black to head height and whitewashed thereafter. If this was an attempt to hide the blood, it had not taken into account the splatters of arterial flow – streaks of dark brown ran up the walls. The floor was dirt and straw, designed to soak up bodily effluent.

There were _many_ more wolves in this room than had been dining with them that evening.

Leah had seen her mate fight before. Not normally in a three-piece suit, however, and the scene was made all the more elegant for it. He moved with economical speed, his face utterly blank. She could watch him for hours.

She sighed, however. She was no helpless female to stand in the sidelines and Chastel’s mate was bothering her.

“Could you take this, please?” Leah asked the British man who seemed to be serving as some form of bodyguard for herself, who had likely saved her life once this evening. She unclasped the necklace and bracelet without much difficulty. She had no real idea how much diamonds were worth but be it one Franc or one hundred thousand, she wasn’t risking such a gift. 

His eyes widened, “Ma’am, what are you—”

Leah ignored him. She moved around the room, behind the werewolves who had appeared to watch this show-down, her eyes on her target. She really couldn’t say why she was so focused on Aimee – instinct had told her something was wrong, though even Bran hadn’t sniffed at her and Bran’s instincts, his ability to notice patterns, was on another level to hers.

The men ignored them, focused on the fight in front of them. Blood had been drawn now. She could feel the excitement in the room. The Beast of Gévaudan versus the Marrok. Europe against the New World. They were all practically slavering at the thought of someone dying tonight.

She stood two yards behind Aimee, watching. The woman was still, her hands loosely at her sides, as if she was observing nothing so interesting as a charming pastoral scene rather than the tearing of flesh.

In a fight between two Alphas, none should interfere once the battle had commenced. It wasn’t a free-for-all, it was a matching of skills, of wills and of strength. Leah didn’t need to look to see how the fight was progressing. She knew Bran was stronger in all those things.

She wondered if Jean Chastel had known that or if his narcissism allowed him to lie to himself.

Aimee’s fingers, still, moved towards her upper thigh, slowly moving into into the fabric, parting it.

In the short time that Leah had in New York, she had insisted on extra panels be sewn into her new skirts. Unfashionably full it may have been, but when she lifted her ankle to her hand, she wanted to be able to move. She wanted to be able to pull the knife from its hand-made sheath without hindrance.

She slunk closer so when Aimee revealed the pistol she was pulling from her own skirts, through a handy pocket that Leah made note to copy, Leah slipped the knife from her ankle and pressed it into her back, digging the point into flesh, well over an inch. She saw Aimee suck in a breath as blood pooled.

“You move one more muscle and I will gut you,” Leah told her, firmly, eyes on her mate once more.

Aimee swallowed. “You don’t understand – he will kill me.”

Leah leaned more fully against her, the knife – silver, with a gold handle – embedding itself more fully into her flesh. “I don’t care.”

Bran smashed his fist beneath Jean Chastel’s chin, sending him flying backwards into a wall. There was an awful crunch. Aimee gasped at her mate’s pain.

It was over.

Leah’s mate, the Marrok, stood over Chastel, breathing shallowly. “One more article, one more news report,” Bran panted, “and I will execute you. You keep your perverse proclivities to yourself, you understand? You continue to live _at my sufferance_ , Jean Chastel. Remember this. Understand me?”

Chastel wheezed out a breath – it sounded as if his lungs had collapsed – and then nodded.

Turning on his heel, Bran jerked his head – at Leah, at Juste, at the British wolf – summoning them to follow him. He appeared unbothered by the fight. Leah stepped back, the knife tugged from Aimee’s body with a bloody _slurp_ and then she tucked it out of the way into the volume of her skirts, and followed her mate. 

*

They did have to buy more luggage and Bran watched with increasingly raised eyebrows as the hotel staff wrapped Leah’s clothes in tissue paper, along with the additional items she had purchased. Linen, bolts of fabric, French fashion magazines and gifts for some members of the pack.

Bran wasn’t without his own purchases, of course. He’d bought a few cases of wine, though he was unsure how well they would travel, and Leah had forced him to be measured for some more suits.

As the last trunk was carried away, Leah stood looking from the window. As was fitting for the mood, it was raining and the sky was overcast. Bran stood by her. He was wearing his arm-splint as he had fractured it quite completely in the fight with Chastel. All his other wounds had more-or-less healed.

Curious, she had asked him why he simply didn’t kill Chastel, who was surely a vile man who deserved an unpleasant death, and Bran had sighed and said _Nature abhors a vacuum_ , which Leah took to mean that there were greater monsters in Europe than Chastel.

Word had reached them the previous day that Jean Chastel’s mate had died and that the Normandy pack’s Alpha had been killed and finally fallen to Chastel’s control. Juste had said his goodbyes.

“I will see you again, my friend,” Bran said, a promise in his voice.

The Frenchman had bowed low. “I certainly hope so.”

Now, as their final minutes in the country dwindled, Leah felt the strangest sense of loss. She couldn’t quite parse it.

“When we get home—” Bran began, then paused.

She waited.

“I would like you to live with me,” he finished.

This proposal wasn’t a complete shock.

When she didn’t immediately jump with enthusiasm, Bran continued, carefully, “We could still have separate rooms. I know your space is important to you. As mine is to me. And of course, you can keep your house. Perhaps we could have a trial, see how it works.”

Leah rolled her head to him and smiled. “Are you nervous?”

“Do you know I am?” He sounded pleasantly surprised. “I’m genuinely not certain you would say yes and it’s something I want.”

For the convenience, no doubt. Bran had enjoyed coming to her room in the night, sometimes more than once, a few steps rather than a walk through the wilderness.

She didn’t mind that either. Sometimes she had come to him.

Leah leaned against his good arm. A trial. An interesting idea. “And if it doesn’t work?”

Bran shrugged, then winced. He had pulled his shoulder out as well. “Then we go back to how it was. No harm, no foul.”

It did sound intriguing. “How long would the trial last?”

“A month, perhaps?”

They would spend the next week together, as well. Another trial in itself.

She thought about it. “Do you think we could get electricity?”

*

They never actually got married. After a few years of living together, Bran adopted a tendency to refer to her as his wife and she in turn called him her husband, particularly when they were in human company.

The towns around them had swollen with humans and humans who didn’t know about werewolves, about fae, about all the magical creatures that walked amongst them. To their mind, men and women who lived together were married, they were not mated.

Leah started to sign documents with his name. _Leah Cornick_ , she would write, with a flourish _Mrs. Leah Cornick._ Sometimes it would give her pause. She had used her husband’s name for so long – the husband she had stood before God and their families and made promises to – that it seemed almost as if she was assuming a different identity, a different personality, by taking Bran’s name.

But it did not give her pause for too long. She was different, after all. The Leah who had worn a gold ring on her finger had been human. The werewolf Leah was very different indeed.

“The time has come,” Bran announced, walking into her new bedroom in their new house with an air of efficiency. He was dressed in blue jeans, the once-scandalous casual wear of the youth of America. Leah herself had several pairs now which she mostly used for their original purpose – laboring in the back yard. Otherwise she adopted a more formal day-to-day look of shift dresses with contrasting cuffs and collars, allowing herself the odd brightly colored pattern as a nod to the pop-art movement.

“For?” she asked vaguely, turning the page of her book.

He turned down the radio she was listening to. “Our marriage.”

Leah paused, since she saw he was serious, and carefully placed her bookmark between the pages before closing it. “Is this your proposal?”

He tossed a ring box onto her bed and threw himself into the chair by her window, which creaked threateningly. “Yes.”

“I am underwhelmed.”

“So am I. It’s for tax reasons.” He propped his chin in his fingers. His eyes lingered on her bare legs. “Charles says it’s _sensible_.”

“You must be joking.” Leah shook her head and reached for the box and unclipped it. A trio of diamonds winked at her. The middle was the size of her thumbnail. “Gracious. I am never going to wear this, Bran.” She had Changed in jewelry before and it either ended up mangled beyond all recognition or lost forever.

“I know. We’ll go and get you some sensible wedding ring for more regular wear. You can lose _that_ at your will.”

She turned the diamond ring over in her fingers. Its style was familiar to her. “Is this an antique?”

“It’s part of the set.”

What ‘set’? Bran had, over the years, given her a great deal of fine jewelry. Diamonds tended to be his preference until, he claimed, De Beers ruined it with their _diamonds are forever_ campaign. Then he switched to other precious stones – usually sapphires and emeralds. Leah rarely wore any of it. Realistically, in the backwoods of Montana, there was little cause for it.

Then it clicked. “Oh, _that_ set.” It clicked again and she sat up, less underwhelmed now. “You saved it, all this time?”

Bran scoffed. “It was practically yesterday.”

“It was,” she thought, twirling the ring between her fingers, “nearly fifty years ago.” It was almost romantic.

“Truly? Doesn’t time fly?” Bran stood again, stretched so that she saw a sliver of his toned stomach, and left the room with the vaguest of smiles.

“I didn’t say ‘yes’!” she called back to him, unable to hold back her smile. She slid the ring onto her engagement finger. It fit perfectly, of course. He’d had fifty years to make sure it was the right size. The diamonds twinkled mesmerizingly.

“A little late for that, Mrs. Cornick!” he returned, already halfway downstairs.

Leah rolled off the bed and went to find the matching bracelet and necklace. Just to see what it would all look like together.

*

Young Dr. Wallace tried to stare Leah down, he really did, but after a while his eyes slanted to the right and he gave in. He sighed, manfully. “All right, ma’am, I’ll see what I can do.”

Out of respect, Leah tried not to smile. Carter Wallace was the spitting image of his father before him and she’d been very fond of Henry Wallace, who had passed not two winters before. In a snowstorm, just the way he had been brought into the world by Leah herself. She had nearly cried at the funeral. Henry had been a werewolf, Changed by Bran when he was young after he had been fatally wounded by a rattlesnake, and yet in the end had not lived longer than a human could. She resolved it would be the last funeral she would attend of their pack. She had been to too many now.

“Did you bully him into doing it?” Sage asked, lounging by Leah’s car as she emerged from the surgery.

“I don’t _bully_ ,” Leah replied, testily. She was not one-hundred-percent sure about this new female, she really wasn’t. She had arrived, battered and bruised, and Bran had given Leah his sternest look. _Behave_ , he’d said to her.

Sage had been tortured by witches. If anyone or anything would have his sympathy, it would be because of that. And she’d had Leah’s sympathy, too. She wasn’t completely cold-hearted. 

The one thing that Leah could say about Sage was that she was a good female to have at your back. They had faced off the Viking wildlings in the forest only the previous month, together, and come out of it better for it. Since then she and Sage had started sparring. Thanks to Bran, Leah was faster, and stronger, but only just. Sage was a good match for her.

She also had a smart mouth and, despite herself, Leah enjoyed that too. There was something to be said for hearing the unvarnished truth from someone, rather than polite words and subservience she knew they didn’t mean.

Very occasionally, Leah had wondered if this was what it was like to have a sister. She and Sage were visually a little similar – similar proportions, similar coloring. And she had seen other siblings bicker the way she and Sage seemed to.

“ _Must_ you wear perfume,” Leah said, sniffing disdainfully, opened her car door. It was a brand new Audi. She had developed something of a car habit. Of course, she had a nice sensible truck – out here, it would be ludicrous not to – but every few years she bought herself something with buttery leather seats and that expensive car smell.

Without asking, Sage climbed into the passenger seat. “I like it. It’s Chanel.” She thrust her wrist into Leah’s face and Leah recoiled. “ _Bran_ gave it to me for my birthday.”

Leah bared her teeth. Bran no longer bought gifts for females. They had learnt that lesson together. “I know. I bought it for him to give to you.”

This silenced Sage.

Triumphant, Leah drove them both back to the big house, where people were coming and going. She saw the edge of the marquee being set up beside the pole barn and nearly sighed. Forty Alphas were to descend upon them this weekend. This Assembly had been long in the making and she could not _wait_ for it to be over.

Carter would be on hand for the full weekend, staying at the Marrok’s house, in case there were any ‘issues’. Samuel had felt he needed additional support. The last time they’d had an assembly there had been a scrap between ten fully grown adults, blood everywhere, and he’d had his hands full. Whilst Carter was a veterinarian, he was their only other option. Bran had been trying to convince him for weeks and Leah had been his last resort.

She checked on the painting – she was having the outside of the house ‘touched up’ – and then chased Sage out of Bran’s office, not for the first time.

“I’m just borrowing a book,” Sage said, clutching one to her chest, her eyes round with provocatively false innocence.

“Then _ask_ him first.” She didn’t know why she had to keep saying this. Bran was rabid about his office space and the only people allowed in it without his permission were his sons and Leah. _Sage_ seemed to think she could walk into whatever room she wanted in the big house. Once she’d found her in her own bedroom, rifling through the stack of magazines looking for, she claimed, an old copy of Vogue.

“Where is His Majesty, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Leah replied, carelessly, as Sage followed her into the kitchen and began going though the refrigerator, snacking on things as she went. Leah glanced at the book that Sage had taken from her husband’s bookcase. _Emily Post’s Etiquette_. How bizarre.

Bran had been absent a great deal recently. She wasn’t being entirely truthful when she had told Sage she didn’t know where he was. Since the fae had made their dramatic ‘come out’, he had been meeting with his contacts from various government agencies over the last few months. Bran was long of the opinion that the time for werewolves to take their turn and reveal themselves to the general public was approaching.

“I’m talking years, now, not decades,” he told her as they lay in bed, face to face. They did most of their talking in bed now. It was increasingly becoming her favorite moment of the day, when her husband switched from lover to confidante.

“How will you manage it?” Leah had asked, fingers stroking over the scars on his chest, over the raised muscles of his abdomen.

For she was confident he would ‘manage it’. This would be no front-page ‘scoop’ but a carefully thought through strategy, executed in his usual cool-headed way.

“I’m making a list of werewolves who might, _might_ , be more optically pleasing to the general public.”

“Optically pleasing?” She raised her eyebrows.

“Well.” Bran rolled onto his front, pushed his hands underneath his pillow. “Keep doing that,” he instructed, with a stern little smile.

Leah switched to stroking his back, snorting a little as her husband wriggled like a happy dog. She kissed his shoulder, affectionately. “You were saying,” she encouraged.

“Yes. I don’t just mean physically pleasing. I mean,” he sighed drowsily, “the right kind of people. Firefighters. Soldiers. Heroes.”

She kissed his shoulder again. “I see.”

Leah could think of a few who would fit that bill. And, indeed, who were aesthetically pleasing, to boot. There was a _very_ handsome Alpha in Washington State whom she had often admired, perhaps not in as subtle a way as she should have done.

Bran fell asleep, deeply, his face soft and relaxed in sleep. She kissed him once more, very lightly, and kept stroking his back, long after she needed to.

*

Leah returned to a strangely quiet house, given she could feel her mate and smell the presence of strangers. Pausing in the side porch to listen, after a moment she heard Bran’s voice in his office down the hall. Then the low timbre of Charles. It wasn’t unusual to have guests in the house. Bran rarely gave her the courtesy of warning her in advance.

She tossed her keys into the bowl on the table by the door and toed off her boots. As she did so, she heard a noise. A noise that instantly said ‘prey’ to Leah and she sniffed the air more intently.

Prey? Indoors?

Walking further into the living area, she saw that a large coop had been set up between the French windows and the back of the couch. As she walked closer still, puzzled at what this could possibly mean, she only became more puzzled when she saw, not an animal, but a baby lying sleeping on the mat inside.

“What the heck?” she asked.

The baby’s murky eyes opened and in the space of a few seconds, _transformed_ from sleepy-eyed baby to pup.

After, Leah couldn’t explain it, couldn’t explain where the thought came from. In the very first instance, the moment she saw that baby change, she wasn’t struck by the wonder of it as she perhaps should have been. No, instead she was struck by the absolute conviction that this was Bran’s child. For who else but Bran would have a child that could change from human to wolf?

Her brain made the short, stumbling steps to what this would mean. Her husband had an affair. _Been with another woman_. Got a child on her, in a way he could not with Leah. 

Had brought that child here. To _their_ home. Leah’s home.

It was an odd sensation, that feeling of her hackles rising in her human form. The tips of her fingers tingled as her wolf rose to the fore, her deadly consciousness sweeping Leah from head to toe.

She was going to kill. Something. Someone. Some _one_ was going to die for this. 

“Ah, there you are, Leah. Margi, this is Leah, my wife. Leah, this is Margi. And this,” with palpable excitement Bran leaned down over the pen the pup was cowering in, and picked it up, dislodging the diaper and onesie, “is Mercedes, her daughter. She can turn into a _coyote_.”

Blindly, Leah looked between Bran, the pup and the human woman. No, the girl. A _very_ young, petite, blonde-haired girl.

The girl cringed back from Leah’s wolf-eyes.

“Leah?” Bran tilted his head and seemed to clock that Leah was not entirely present. He turned his smiling, easy-going face to his son. “Charles, could you take Mercedes and Margi into the kitchen? Perhaps find a little something Mercedes might like to eat in this form.”

This handoff took place, a squirming coyote pup passed to the silent Charles, who gently propelled the blonde human towards the kitchen. Leah watched them go. He had brought his other female to her house to? Did he have such disrespect for her?

Slowly, Bran approached Leah, drawing her attention. “Hmm, now, what happened here?”

Leah’s wolf wouldn’t let go of her. She could not speak. She stared at her mate, who had betrayed her. She heard the low, rumbling growl in her chest. She wanted to hurt him but could she? Did she have it in her? Could she kill him? For this? This, the worst of all betrayals? The one she had somehow been dreading without knowing it?

Something of Bran’s power leaked towards her, a coolness brushing her. Calming. He made soft noises, his fingertips coming to touch her arms. “What has triggered this, hmm?” he asked soothingly.

But Leah could not be soothed.

 _Leah? Can you hear me?_ he asked, mind to mind.

She hit him – a quick jab to the solar plexus, unplanned, just a reaction of her anger.

In an instant, Bran went from calm to action. He moved faster than she, spinning her around so that she was pinned to his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around her. His power was no longer leaking, it was pouring into her. “I can feel you there. Why has she taken over? What happened? Was it the shock of the child changing? I know a coyote is a discomforting presence, I can feel that myself, but surely your wolf wouldn’t want to harm a child?”

Leah was panting. She was straining hard to be freed but it was like he was made of stone.

Bran tucked his head into her neck and breathed. “There’s nothing I can smell on you but anxiety and anger— good Lord, Leah, you didn’t think she was mine?”

He dragged her over to the mantelpiece, to the mirror that was above, and his hazel eyes met her icy-blue. “Did you think she was mine?” he repeated.

Her eyes flickered, from wolf-blue to her deeper blue.

“That’s a _yes_ ,” her husband said damningly. Anger built on his face. “I see.” He released her and Leah stumbled forward, fingers reaching for the shelf. She came face to face with a photograph of them, taken last Christmas. She and Bran, Charles and Samuel standing behind them. They all had ridiculous smiles on their faces, even Leah.

“Well, rest assured, I didn’t get that teenager with child,” her mate whispered furiously behind her, his words imbued with truth and disgust. “That was some other creature. She will be leaving her with us, a difficult enough decision for any mother to make, especially young as she is. I’ll ask you to keep your irrational responses to yourself, lest she changes her mind and thinks she, a human, could keep her baby safe from those who would harm her for what she is.”

Finally, Leah’s voice returned to her. “With us?” she asked.

“Bryan and Evelyn have agreed to foster her.” A darkly humorous noise came from Bran. “I – correctly, it appears – assumed our house would not be the best place for such a vulnerable creature.”

He walked off and Leah rested her head against the cool mantelpiece, her legs shaking.

*

The coyote pup was the delight of all in Aspen Creek. Like proud parents, Bryan and Evelyn toted her around for all to see. Leah watched as the men in particular fell over themselves to entertain her, in both her baby and pup form, equally entertained.

Leah hated it. She found herself in the unconscionable position of hating _an infant_. She couldn’t seem to stop herself, though she did try - rationally acknowledging that disliking a baby because of her own actions was a truly disgusting act. For weeks, she tormented herself with the knowledge that she had done wrong by Bran, of course, and she apologized to him profusely. He had said he had forgiven her but she thought she had wounded him in a way she had not done before and she bitterly regretted it.

This, too, tainted her feelings towards the baby.

Gratefully, for the first few years of her life, Mercedes was not much in Leah’s company. Children of the pack were kept away from the more dominant werewolves until they could be taught proper wolf manners –not look a wolf in the eye, to keep their heads down and their wits about them. They lived in a town with dangerous predators. There were benefits to that but there were also downsides.

Around Mercedes’s eleventh, perhaps twelfth birthday, it was Sam who first posited, out loud, his theory at a Sunday family dinner.

“Coyotes and wolves can breed in the wild,” he said, considering the matter.

Abruptly, Leah put her fork down. Of course. A return to his favorite topic.

Samuel had not married since his last wife. Had spent much of the last century practicing medicine, fully focusing on his career and developing a name for himself. She knew he had plans to return to medical school. He couldn’t continue practicing on a license he received before the turn of the century and there were new techniques he wanted to learn.

She had heard many conversations over the years between he and Bran. Discoveries Sam had made in the name of his father’s cause. And, as always, his mind turned to the fertility of their people. 

She took a large sip of her wine and was surprised when Bran seemed to be interested in the topic rather than, perhaps more appropriately, telling his son that discussing the fertility of a child at dinner was rather unpleasant.

“Mercy doesn’t need to change. She’s not called by the pull of the moon,” Sam continued, as Leah’s husband made thoughtful noises.

No, indeed, as well as a swift, painless change, the girl could sleep through a full moon whenever she wanted. She could go for weeks without taking her coyote mutt form. Leah gulped down another mouthful of wine. She could carry a child to term, moon be damned. It had occurred to Leah before. Naturally she had not voiced this bitter thought. She tried not to talk about Mercedes at all.

What Sam was suggesting, however, was that Mercedes might be able to carry a _werewolf_ child. The holy grail of babies. A child like Charles.

The wine tasted like acid in her mouth when before it had tasted like a very pleasant Merlot.

In her room that night, Bran chastised her bad mood, correctly identifying her reason. “Do _you_ want a child?” he demanded of her.

“No, of course not,” she said truthfully, a response she did not need to give much thought to.

“Then _why_ does this bother you so much?”

‘Bother’. Such a mild term. She shook her head, pulling back the comforter. “I don’t know. She— I cannot seem to stop myself. I _try_. You must see that I try.”

Bran pulled a face. “I see you pretend. You are not convincing,” he told her.

“It’s as good as you’re going to get.” She climbed into her side of the bed, scowling.

Her husband snorted. Then Bran sighed, deeply, standing at the foot of the bed and suddenly looking very tired. “I do not want a repeat of last time.”

There were, to Leah’s shame, many ‘last times’ but she was not fool enough to ask which one. “It’s not the same thing.”

“Is it not?” Bran raised imperious eyebrows.

“She’s a child.” Leah was sick of this topic. “Are you sleeping here tonight?”

Bran hesitated, then nodded. He pulled off his T-shirt, flicking that internal switch of his from Marrok to lover in an instant.

*

Leah was not kind to Mercedes. She was not kind to many – but, as Bran pointed out to her in one of their many arguments on the topic, it appeared worse when it was directed at a mostly-human teen.

“I’m just toughening her up,” Leah would say, shrugging. It was a little true, which was why Bran had to let it go. On some level, Mercy’s vulnerability bugged Leah. If she was going to live in their world, she would need to be better than everyone else. She couldn’t just be like the other children and simply learn to be submissive and hope for the best. She had to be more cunning.

That was all it was, she told herself. Toughening her up. Bran did actually agree with her, too. He wanted Mercedes to survive. He cherished her uniqueness, the Coyote magic that ran in her veins, but he too knew she was weak.

Sometimes it went too far, like the time Leah chased the girl out of the pack run and abandoned her so far away it took her two days to make her way back home. Leah was punished for that. She had shot her once, too. Mostly accidentally. She had been punished for that, as well.

Mercedes toughened up fast and quickly began to fight back, in her own way, by pulling pranks that grew increasingly, frustratingly undetectable. And the more undetectable they were, the more Bran could not punish her. And her tricks were not just aimed at Leah but at Bran, too. Bran, who at times seemed more annoyed at Mercedes that Leah did. That had pleased her. She liked to think she had helped sow the seeds of that displeasure.

At first, Leah thought it was just Sam who was smitten with her. ‘Smitten’ – she snorted to herself as she considered the word she had chosen. There could be no other word, not for a man who was, oh, one-hundred-and-twenty times the girl’s age. Any other word would be uncomfortable, even for Leah who had been married at seventeen. That had been a different time. She knew that.

But age was a tricky thing from Sam’s and Bran’s point of view. By the time she had lost both her foster parents, Mercedes had a woman’s body and had started her menses. When she changed into her coyote shape, she was as big as an adult wild coyote was. She lived alone. She cooked for herself, with a little guidance from some around her. She worked at the motel to earn some money, though Bran of course covered all her bills and groceries.

She was precocious and smart and, more to the point, had been _told_ she was both those things. Bran had invested more time in Mercedes’s education than any other child that had come through Aspen Creek. He had even taught her some Welsh. He had never even bothered to do that with Leah.

Perhaps because she saw in Bran’s attention the fatherly albeit dictatorial attitude he gave to all his people, it took Leah too long to note that there was another element to it. Certainly, Mercedes herself was too caught up in Sam’s wiles to notice it and respond.

But one day Leah watched the smile unfold on her husband’s face at the girl who had outsmarted him once more and realized she had been missing something crucial. Her hand clenched around her fork so hard she felt it bend beneath her fingers.

Gently, Tag plucked this implement from her fingers. She looked at him blindly. “Do you see?” she whispered, horrified.

Tag pressed his lips together. “It’s nothing to concern yourself with.”

He was wrong. He was so wrong. It was _everything_ she should be concerned with.

Bran had been right, though he could not have seen it back then. It _was_ similar to last time and she knew which ‘last time’ he had been referring to. She saw it now. Like Helena, Mercedes was dark haired and dark eyed. Alone and vulnerable, just the type of woman an Alpha like Bran would want to protect. Worse, still, Mercedes was magic. She was mixed race, Native American, though presumably a different tribe to Charles’s mother, the inestimable Blue Jay woman whom people still talked of as if she had died a dozen years before instead of nearly two centuries. Werewolves had long memories and Aspen Creek was cursed with werewolves who had lived to have longer memories than most.

Leah had overreacted last time. This time she was sure she was not.

Her husband, she was quite convinced, was courting Mercedes. And he was doing it at the same time as his own son, whose overt attentions were setting tongues wagging. Leah witnessed Bran and Sam go head to head on the topic, several times, Bran coming ever closer to forbidding his son from involving himself with Mercedes. _She’s too young, at least wait until she’s gone to college, for pity’s sake._ _Let her live her life_. 

Yes, Sam was up to his old tricks. She saw that. When he closed his eyes, he saw babies like his younger brother. And Leah wanted to encourage that. If Sam succeeded – oh, she saw the hypocrisy in herself, after decades of hating Sam for this very selfish desire – then Mercedes would be out of reach.

So, it was Leah who suggested to Sam that they elope. “She’s sixteen. Provided you get parental consent, it’s legal.” She raised her eyebrows. “I’m sure _you_ could convince Margi.” Sam had been punctilious in his wooing of Mercedes’s mother the last dozen times she had visited.

Not used to Leah being in any way supportive of his actions, Sam was naturally suspicious. “Is your strategy here that if we married, Da would throw us out of Aspen Creek? You’d kill two birds with one stone.”

Leah shrugged. “Something like that.”

He gave her a nasty smile. “Selfish as ever, Leah.”

She returned the smile in spades. “Pot kettle, Samuel.”

But the idea bore fruit. Bran returned furiously one night, undressing in the dark of her room, spitting with rage. “I have to send her away. The fool is planning to elope with her.” He climbed into bed beside her, rigid with his emotions. She knew better than to get near him. “How could he be so stupid?”

She pressed her face into the pillow, holding her breath. She couldn’t react. It would be fatal.

But Bran turned to look at her, eyes glittering. “You’re remarkably silent on this topic. I thought _you_ would have something to say.”

Leah swallowed. “I’m glad you’re sending her away,” she said quietly.

“Ha!” Bran said bitterly. “Of course you are. I cannot imagine you would relish her as a daughter-in-law.”

“More tolerable than the alternative.”

“The alternative?”

Leah nibbled at the cotton of her pillow case. “Sam was not the only one courting her, Bran.”

For a long moment, the silence that filled her bedroom felt like the moment when she leaned over the edge of a precipice and her stomach took the drop without her ever taking a step.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said, finally.

She had decades to know him, intimately. She had become one of the handful of people who could tell when the Marrok spoke an untruth. “ _Lie_ ,” she accused him.

Quick as a flash, he was up, off her bed. It was the first time Bran had ever stormed from her room, the slam of the door between their connecting rooms shaking the very foundations of the house.

It was the confirmation she neither wanted or needed. Not for the first and not for the last time in her marriage, Leah cried herself to sleep.

*

Thus began a period of coolness between them. Bran did not speak of it – he did not apologize or otherwise suggest that she had been right – and Leah did not raise it as a topic. She couldn’t bear to. _She_ didn’t want to be right. It became this lingering, painful elephant in the room, made even more so by the deterioration of Sam, whose mind seemed to be faltering with the loss of the woman his wolf had obviously decided was his mate. 

Two months after Mercedes left, he too disappeared. At first, Bran worried that he had gone to find Mercedes but a quick phone call to the Portland pack dissuaded him of that. After that it was a waiting game for that moment when they would read of his death in the newspaper, for Bran was certain that they would.

Life in the pack continued, of course. A celebrity werewolf was brought to Aspen Creek, a man called Asil, more commonly called the Moor. Tales were told of this man but, by all accounts, he was not long for this world. His son could not kill him and asked Bran to do it.

Her mate did not relish the killing of his people, no matter that it was often for the common good, and he would make no snap decisions on the matter. “He seems perfectly sane to me. Ornery, but sane,” he told Leah. Then he seemed to realize he was talking to her and left the room, dismissing her entirely.

Leah vacillated some days between sadness and anger at this treatment. Today, it was anger at the injustice of it all, that she was being punished for Bran’s misdemeanor. _She_ was the wronged one in the party. _Her_ eyes had never been turned by a handsome face or pretty words.

Furiously, she shoved on hiking boots and left the house. It was no use trying to start an argument with Bran. He was wise to her ways now and would ignore her, eyes glittering, and not give her the raised temper she was looking for, the wounding, decisive words she craved. She would have to expel her energy elsewhere and exercise was the way to do it.

Instinctively, she made her way to where she used to live, quite contentedly, on her own. The cottage, for that was what it was now, had been made over several times since she had lived there. It didn’t even really look like the house Leah had once called home. The previous tenants had asked Bran’s permission to build a greenhouse and she stopped to admire this structure. She had a smaller, older structure at the edge of her back yard and had long been thinking to have it updated. She had a green thumb, as they said, and enjoyed growing her own limited produce through the year – all the variants of tomatoes, lettuce, chilies, pumpkin, beetroot and potatoes. She would be able to grow more if she could start them off in a better environment.

A shape moved behind the somewhat cloudy glass of the greenhouse and Leah’s head tilted to the side, listening. Yes, there was someone moving around in there.

Had Bran rented the house? He had not mentioned it to her. He _always_ mentioned it to her, as it was her house. Emotionally and technically – this house was in her name. A piece of freedom he had given her when they married.

“Hello?” she called.

A man stepped into the mouth of the greenhouse. Darkly handsome, she felt the intense push of his power, even at this distance. Much with all dominant werewolves, Leah felt that sudden tingling rush that accompanied such power. Power was attractive. Well used to ignoring that, she walked closer. “Asil Moreno,” she greeted, guessing this was the Moor of legend.

The man inclined his head. Not properly, not all the way as he should have done. He had no idea who she was.

Leah wondered if she might get his measure better if he didn’t know he was speaking to the Marrok’s mate. Hands in her back pockets, she made her way down the incline that was the border to the house’s land. “I used to live here,” she said, conversationally. “I hadn’t realized someone had moved in.”

“Indeed? I will not be staying long,” he said vaguely.

Leah smiled, as if confused. “No? That’s a shame. It’s a good place to live. It was a good home to me,” she said, looking at the flint siding. She heard the note of wistfulness in her voice, unintended.

Asil looked her up and down. Not without interest, she thought. “You are part of this pack? His pack?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Then, I suppose, I could offer you – tea?” he suggested, somewhat haltingly.

“How lovely.”

Inside the house that had once been her home, the Moor made her tea in a slow, considering manner and handed her a steaming cup, his dark, lushly lashed eyes lingering on the low V of her neckline.

A consequence of being in some form of conflict with her husband was that Leah was putting in more effort to her appearance than she might normally do. As if – imagine – the curl of her hair might somehow sway a man who had forgotten more women than she’d had hot meals.

Even whilst she acknowledged the foolishness of this, each day Leah dried her hair with a wave, pushed it back from her face with barrettes or braided it in increasingly complicated styles. Her brassieres were padded to make more of her assets, over which she wore tight shirts with low necks, equally tight pants.

Unconsciously, Leah found herself adjusting her body language, angling in such a way it was clear she was inviting him to look his fill. And he did, sipping his tea, looking at her hips, the curve of her waist, her breasts, her mouth.

“I don’t think we’ve ever had the pleasure,” he told her, lifting his eyes to hers.

Leah smiled slowly. She tilted her head so that her hair fell over one shoulder. “I’m sure I would have remembered if we had.”

It had been a very long time since she had flirted with a man. It was remarkably stimulating. She felt desirable and _sexy_ in a way she had not felt in… ever.

Asil put down his tea and stepped closer to her. A _frisson_ of excitement tickled her. She found herself transfixed by his eyes. Dark, mesmeric, framed by long, thick lashes. He was very different from her mate.

It was that thought that sent cold rushing through her, just as Asil took another step forward, well into her personal space. She could feel the heat of his body now and she did not want it. She did not want _this_. 

Panicked, Leah put her hands on his shoulders, holding him off but not before he was close enough to take a deep breath. His head recoiled backwards, eyes flaring with horror.

“You smell like— the Marrok.”

She nodded, frantically. “My husband,” she whispered.

“You are my Alpha’s _mate_ ,” he spat. With one hand gripping her arm, he pushed her to the side, hard enough that she stumbled and smacked into the wall, shoulder first. She spun – but he’d thrown her into a corner of the kitchen so that he was positioned in front of the only exit, blocking her. It was not a large kitchen.

In front of her eyes, Asil seemed to grow in size, the muscles of his face and neck flickering with his anger. Such anger, the rage she had only seen in the face of Bran’s wildlings, when their wolves had crossed over that fine line into taking control.

Leah was in danger. It had been a long, long time since she had felt this kind of danger from a man, trapped where she could not escape. She began to pull from the pack using Bran’s power, making herself stronger. She could hear herself panting and she reached for the back of a kitchen chair, intending to break it, to give herself some kind of a weapon, however meagre. She had killed with less.

She would survive this, Leah thought, as terror tried its hardest to overcome her. She would survive this mistake, she decided, as she rammed the chair against the wall, breaking it into sharp-ended pieces.

In front of her, Asil was swaying from side-to-side, emanating aggression so thick she could all but taste it. He was readying himself to attack.

“ _Asil._ ”

The punch of unfiltered Alpha strength flattened both of them. Leah slumped against the wall, Asil had to catch himself on the table as the strength of their wolves faltered. Sour metal filled her mouth, coated her tongue. Even relieved as she was, she could not look at Bran.

“Leah, get out,” he ordered.

Leah stumbled towards him and he stepped to the side without looking at her, dismissing her utterly. She headed down the hall, to the front door, which had been ripped off its hinges. She hadn’t heard it go.

Outside, she sucked in great lungsful of air, hands on her hips. It tasted sweet but bitter. She was breathing too hard. She bent over, rested her hands on her knees and tried to regain some form of composure.

At the gravel-lined drive, Leah swore. She did not often swear. Bran did not like it, thought it a sign of an ill-trained mind. But this was a time for swearing. If Bran killed Asil now, it would be her fault.

She sank down onto a grassy knoll, waiting, listening, her fingers pressed over her mouth. It was very silent, both in and outside of the house. Even the birds were quiet, as if they were listening too.

Minutes passed.

An hour.

Leah remained frozen in place, waiting, barely breathing.

When Bran did emerge, it had started raining. A light drizzle. He tilted his face to it for a moment, as if the rain could clean his sins away, then his gaze honed in on her.

 _Shit_ , Leah thought again. She had a well honed fight or flight response and – faced with the look in Bran’s eyes – she wanted to run. But it would be fatal. Instead, she sat, forcing herself to be still, as he approached her.

Bran used the silence to his advantage, standing in front of her with nothing to say, letting her start to quake once more in fear. Then he moved fast, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her up so they were face to face. His eyes burned hers. “Explain yourself,” he demanded through his teeth. 

In direct contrast to every instinct she had, she could not look away from him. “You know why, Bran,” she whispered, shivering. “You _know_ why.”

With a nose of disgust, Bran released her, half turned as if to leave her and then he seemed to change his mind. He spun back so quickly she thought she was about to be struck, but he pushed her into the fence that edged the front yard instead. It creaked – ominously – but held.

He pressed their foreheads together, his hand on the nape of her neck. It was not gentle. “So, what was the plan, you would give yourself to him? For revenge?”

 _Give herself…?_ Leah shook her head. She touched his face. His skin felt chilled, almost damp. “No, no, Bran. I would never do that. I could never. I—” She licked her dry lips. How to explain, the madness that had overtaken her? And then that clear-as-day epiphany. Bran was all she wanted. All she would ever want. 

“Neither would I,” Bran said quietly. She felt his hand flex on her neck, his head moving against hers.

She closed her eyes, sinking in her _shame_. “It was not his fault.”

“I know that. I know.” Then he kissed her – or what was something savagely close to it. His mouth slanted over hers, his tongue pressing inside, forcing her to open her mouth to take him. Fear, regret, anger – everything was pushed aside at astonishing speed for lust. Pure, desperate lust. She all but climbed him, wrapping her arms and legs around him, returning his kiss with one of her own, with the force of her own desire for him. It grew wildly, wildly out of control. She pushed his T-shirt up, wanting to touch him, and didn’t for the slightest moment protest when he undid her jeans, pushed them down past her hips. She did the same to him, a throbbing need at the very heart of her.

He had her, she gave herself to him, against the creaking fence, with no sense of their surroundings, no sense of shame. When she came, her mouth smothered by his, tears leaked from her eyes and when he finished inside of her, he held her in an embrace for long, long moments afterwards.

“Never again, Leah,” he told her, kissing her neck, licking the bite mark she could feel throbbing there.

“Never again.” She pulled at his hair so they could meet, eye to eye. “And I want that promise from you, as well.”

For the first time, she saw acknowledgement, she saw contrition in Bran’s eyes. “Never again,” he agreed, touching his fingers to her mouth. They kissed, softly, once more to seal the amendment to their mating bargain.

*

It helped. It certainly helped that they had more than ten years years of relative peace together. Bran was careful with her and Leah tried harder – _very_ hard – to be mindful of her less trusting emotions.

Then, one November, on the first full moon after the ceremony in October, Leah scented her. It was unlucky in many senses. It was full moon. She was in her wolf’s pelt. They were mid-hunt and it was the best hunt of the year – the one where Bran’s blood was high, he was in an infectiously joyous mood, as they celebrated with the newly Changed. Leah had allowed her instincts to be front and center.

Worse still, when she did reach Mercedes, having stalked the girl through the forest, she did so just after Samuel did and he immediately chastised Leah – a move that would have put her back up even without Mercedes’s presence. Now, in front of Mercedes, a witness to Samuel’s constant breach of hierarchy, Leah was doubly humiliated.

By comparison, Bran’s chastisement was mild. _We agreed_ , he said to her, mind-to-mind, as he bared his teeth at her.

Leah whined but he was right, of course. She lowered her head and lay listening, belly exposed, whilst Mercedes told her merry tale. She expected Bran to Change, to go haring off with her. Instead to her relief, he instructed Charles that he would finish the run with their three new Changes, Leah and the rest of the pack.

For the remainder of the night, Leah kept her wolf more contained, subdued. She chased up prey, giving the young wolves an easier job in their first animal kills, and assessed them, just as Bran was doing. They were confident in these three – sometimes you could just tell. It was a relief, after last year. With what was happening with Carter.

They returned home to Change, Leah going to her room like she usually did. She expected Bran to follow and it was only afterwards, when she had pulled on her robe, that she realized he had not. And that he was gone. 

So began a restless few hours for Leah, waiting in the house knowing that he had gone to her. A woman grown now. No longer a child.

She paced and when she heard the door downstairs, ran to meet him.

“Well? Are you going with her?” Leah demanded, standing at the top of the stairs in her pajamas.

Bran sighed, looking up at her, his hand resting on the banister. “No, I am not. But I will send Samuel with her.”

“Oh? Is that a good idea?” She shook her head, tried not to get distracted by the ever-growing concern that was Bran’s eldest son. “What has she to do with Adam’s pack anyway?” Much like when she had been in Aspen Creek, Mercedes was not part of the Columbia Basin Pack, just lived in the territory at Adam Hauptman’s sufferance.

Her husband grumbled, forcing his way past her and heading towards his room. “A good deed. I repeat: she is not staying.”

As he passed her, she breathed in sharply. He did not smell of her. Not in any sense that suggested lingering physical contact

Bran paused, raised his eyebrows. “Really, Leah. What did you think would happen? That I would fuck her in the motel room?”

She flinched and Bran blew out a breath. “I apologize. That was uncalled for,” he murmured, in reference to the language or the implication, Leah did not know. She felt blisteringly angry. It was too much. Hands clenched to her sides, she spun on her heel and marched into her bedroom, picking up a pillow and pressing it to her face.

Leah breathed hot, damp air, wanting to scream but couldn’t. It was as if all the feelings and sensations, all her anger from long before was bottling up inside behind something heavier, more powerful. And beneath it all was a querulous, desperate sadness. _Please make her leave_ , she begged. _Please. Please let it go back to the way it was_.

She heard Bran calmly brushing his teeth, a bristling sound that came closer still as he stood between the connecting door of their rooms and looked at her. He returned to his bathroom to rinse.

“Come to bed in my room,” he called to her, gently. “You’ve been pacing and your room smells anxious.”

The urge to scream came back and she pressed the pillow to her face for a moment longer before dropping it. She knew what he was doing, as she passed by him. He could not console her in the way she wanted, so sex was the answer. As Leah pulled back the covers on his bed, she heard his pants hit the floor. The awful truth was she did want to have sex with him. She wanted to feel the weight of his body, see his eyes dilate as he came within her. She could hold him close when they were together and, as they were in his room, he wouldn’t leave afterwards.

Bran pressed himself, naked, to the length of her back and tugged her camisole upwards. “It’s all right,” he whispered to her neck, stroking his hand over her belly. “It’s all right, Leah. I _promise_.”

It wasn’t all right. Carter, Mercedes – it felt like it would never be all right again.

*

As if the re-entrance of Mercedes into their lives wasn’t enough, a new torment arrived in Aspen Creek only a few weeks later.

“Is there,” Leah said through gritted teeth when she found her husband, “a particular reason you chose _not_ to tell me Charles had brought an _Omega_ back with him?”

“The funeral was fine, Leah, thank you for asking. As expected our people treated me like the murderer I am, which really added a delightful flavor to the miserable experience.”

She tossed her jacket onto the chair in his room, a matching one to the one in hers. She smoothed her hands over her hair. “That’s fair,” she said, taking a deep breath. “I am sorry.”

The Omega had made a point to say it had been noted that Leah had been absent. That had added fuel to Leah’s anger. How dare some _baby_ werewolf make comments on her relationship?

She groaned. “I humiliated myself in front of her.” Spouting all that _stuff_ about Blue Jay woman. Where had that come from? Some deep well of inferiority? She had long come to terms with that. Hadn’t she?

Her husband lifted his head from the pillow, irritation easing on his face. “How so? Have you been crying?” he asked, astonished.

She kicked off her boots, resolving to tidy up after herself later. “I don’t want to tell you. You sent _Sage_.” Who was – as usual – very rude to her. That girl was getting far too big for her boots.

Bran lifted his eyebrows. “Do you blame me? You know how you are with females.”

“Ha! And you know how _you_ are.”

“Do not start that again.”

They were spoiling for another fight. Leah was _sick_ of fighting. It was all they seemed to do at the moment. It was as if every word that left her mouth was a dig at him and every word from his was a criticism of her. 

“It would have been _helpful_ ,” Leah said, trying desperately to control herself, “if you had _told me_ what she was.” Told her _anything._

“It would be _helpful_ if you finally learned how to _control yourself_ ,” he replied, in equally calm tones, “so that _others_ didn’t have to babysit you.”

“Oh fuck you, Bran.” She stalked out of his room and stood in her bathroom. Her mascara had run and as she watched, more tears fell. What was wrong with her? Was this the remnants of the Omega’s power?

She wiped them away, blew her nose and then rifled in the cabinet above her basin for make-up remover. She didn’t know why she had put make-up on in the first place; she usually didn’t bother. She felt discombobulated by the whole day.

Leah washed her face and undid her hair, the motions making her feel calmer. She emerged to find Bran had relocated to her bed and was reading one of her magazines. “We did not score very well on this marriage quiz,” he said.

She sniffed. “No.”

“I disagree with the answer you put for question four.” With a sigh, Bran tossed it aside and it hit the floor. She would have to look up what question four was later.

He appraised her, neutrally. “Shall we have sex? That usually makes us both feel better.”

She thought about it for the barest moment and then started to undress. Bran mirrored her, tossing his T-shirt in the direction of her chair, wriggling out of his pants. Naked, she crawled over him, pushing him back into the pillows, her hair falling down like a curtain around his face.

They looked at each other, evidence of Bran’s interest stirring between them.

“I saw we got full marks for this part,” he said, nudging her nose with his.

“Yes. We did.” She bent her head to kiss him.

Bran was right, of course. Sex did make them both feel better. It was an easier way for them to communicate, one that didn’t involve cutting words or expressing emotions. After all, he didn’t have any emotions – so he claimed – and she didn’t like that she did. But when he stroked his hands down her sides, it felt like he cared. When she took him into her body, she was telling him she trusted him. When they both reached that peak of pleasure, it reminded them both that this was something good they were capable of making together.

When his fingers relaxed their vice-like grip on her hips, Leah eased them apart and flopped down on top of him, panting and sated. She rose and fell with the inflation and deflation of chest under hers. His hands squeezed her butt. “Better,” he murmured.

She nodded. She rubbed her cheek against his. “I know you had to kill him,” she whispered, finally, the words like chips of marble, falling from her tongue. Cutting her.

Bran rolled them so they were face to face. He stroked her cheek. “Thank you for saying so.” The unspoken _finally_ was left in the air.

Her bottom lip wobbled. _Goddamn_ that Omega. “I was there when he was born.”

“I know.”

“When his _father_ was born, Bran.” There they went again, the tears cascading down her cheeks like a waterfall. When she had thought of attending the funeral, this had been what she worried about. The Marrok’s wife, collapsing like a wet flower in the front pew.

Bran held her as she wept, for Carter. For little Henry before him, born in a snowstorm, their brave, fierce young wolf taken too soon. When she was done and she was limp, she apologized, wiping her tears from his scarred chest and then kissing him there. “I should have been next to you. I’m sorry. I couldn’t bear it.”

“I know. I don’t blame you.”

He was a better man than she. She had let him down. She clung to him. “I am truly sorry, Bran,” she said, again.

“Leah, it doesn’t matter.” Bran sighed. “You would have lost your temper with them. It would have helped nobody.”

He told her, then, a little of the service and she bristled. He was right. Despite her feelings, she would have been furious with them all. They had no right to speak to the Marrok that way.

His tone lightening, Bran told her of the Omega and how she had handled Asil. This, at least, made her snort. She had been at the receiving end of that ‘handling’, too. At least she was not alone.

She enjoyed the thought of Asil being brought low by someone.

“How’s Charles?” she asked, an obvious afterthought. He had been wounded – Bran had at least told her that.

“Better.” He pinched her butt again, smiling. “Thank you for pretending to care.”

She grunted. “You’re welcome.”

*

Having an Omega _in_ their pack was an ‘interesting’ experience and even in Leah’s head she put the quotation marks around it.

On a personal level, Leah found Anna irritating. For one, she was not remotely deferential to Leah, who had long been used to normal werewolves whose hierarchies were as intrinsic as her own. Anna toed the line but she did so in a way that made it clear she was just waiting for Leah to leave so she could disobey, or go to Bran or Charles to get Leah’s order amended.

And she was rather too _sweet_ , that wide-eyed good kind, not at all the kind of woman that Leah felt made a good werewolf.

Of course, she was also clever – no, not just clever, _educated_ , and musical and cultured. All the things that Bran adored and that Leah had never managed to develop. Thanks to this, and enabled by Charles, Anna thought she knew best. All the time.

That bothered her, of course. It would have bothered her more had Anna not been mated to Charles and so obviously besotted with their sullen, sulky Second, but it still bothered her.

Her cold-hearted husband _liked_ Anna and Leah knew soon he would love her, in a way he had never tried to love Sam’s human wives. In a way he could not love Leah, who was none of the things Anna was.

And yet she was an Omega and the wolf within Leah wanted to protect, cherish and love her.

Bran found it amusing, of course – Leah’s internal conflict. “It’s good for you,” he decided, the patronizing bastard.

She pulled a face at him behind his back. Of course, he knew and he lifted his eyebrows.

She changed the subject. “She is _desperately_ interested in us,” Leah said to him, lolling back against the cushions she had used to bolster her back whilst she watched television. She had paused the show when her husband returned. If it wasn’t sci-fi or historical documentaries, Bran wasn’t interested.

“Us as in ‘us’?” Bran repeated, as if he didn’t well know. He leaned over the back of the couch to look at her.

“Yes. I suppose her only mated role models had been Leo and that demented bitch, Isabelle.”

“What a horrifying thought.”

“That they were her role models or that we might be?” Leah grinned, getting the drift of his thoughts as she often did.

Bran grinned back and then that grin dimmed. He stood, distancing himself from her. “I suppose she could do worse.”

She did not like the doubt in his voice. She made an attempt to bring back the lightness of the mood, unsure why he had let it go, “Certainly in comparison to Leo and Isabelle.”

It didn’t work. Bran’s face only darkened further. He left her without another word.

*

The day the Berserker came was one of the worst experiences in Leah’s recent memory. She left his bed before dawn that morning as he turned his back on her to speak on the phone to his son, annoyed he would chose to speak to Samuel instead of discuss his nightmare with her, and then she was annoyed with herself for leaving him.

Minutes later, Leah heard him pause outside her door, longed for him to come in, to tell him what he was doing. But once again he made the choice to leave her out of it, knowing full well he was hurting her in doing so.

Recently, Leah had begun to form the startling thought that sometimes Bran did it on purpose, that he was _deliberately_ causing the tension between them. It seemed to be the only logical answer. He knew her well enough by now that he could easily do it. And the _why_ wasn’t too hard to understand, either.

It was easier for him to dislike her when she was at her most dislikeable. And this person – this woman who threw jealous tantrums and who sulked and attacked the people he loved – she was very dislikeable, indeed. 

Rolling onto her front, Leah closed her eyes. She wouldn’t care, she told herself. _She wouldn’t care._

So began several hours of Leah determining that she wouldn’t care, coupled with quite a few examples of how much she did. When it was light, she called Tag, then Heather. The first didn’t answer – not unusual – and the second was none the wiser. 

Then, stealing herself because part of the conversation she _had_ overheard had been about Asil, she called his house. He did not answer, either.

She tapped her fingers on the kitchen counter. In a flurry of _not caring_ , she had started preparing a casserole and it was bubbling merrily away. Something simple with lots of vegetables that had required chopping. Chop, chop, chop, went the knife. _I. don’t. care,_ was her mantra.

Bran had said that Asil had taken off after Charles. He was definitely involved. Dressing warmly, casserole on a low heat, Leah walked the short distance to his-once-her-house and knocked on the door, the scene of her almost-infidelity a distant memory now lost in her concern. There was no answer. She assumed this meant he was still out.

She paced around his house, nonetheless, then peered into the hothouse. Nothing. He was definitely gone. And, she noted, she could smell Sage’s prolonged presence. That was something to think about.

Mid-afternoon, she felt Bran close off the pack bonds almost entirely. It was an odd sensation. As his mate, she had a closer connection through the pack than most and to feel their presence become so muted for the first time in two centuries was— well, a little like chopping off a hand, she supposed.

Things must be very serious in the Cabinets, indeed, if he was cutting off the pack bonds.

Try as she might, she could not recall the little she had overheard on the phone in any great detail. Her anger and hurt had blocked out her senses. Had there been something about Asil’s long-dead mate?

With the change in the pack bonds, she fielded a few phone calls from the pack. Tag, returning her call, wanting to know if he should head up there himself.

“No,” Leah said, firmly. If Bran needed help, he would ask for it. Besides, Charles and Asil were there, presumably with him. That was more than enough firepower and Tag was not the stable creature he had once been. “Can you do a quick check of our more dangerous wildlings, please? I’m sure Bran has it well in hand but some of them would not do well with this limited level of connection to him.”

“That’s a good idea,” Tag grunted. “Will you do the others?”

She sighed. “Yes, I will.”

So she and Tag checked on their wildlings, she taking the weaker, the ‘safer’ wildlings that Bran thought it appropriate for her to see on her own. She knew her own limits; she wasn’t about to commit suicide in her husband’s absence.

It took several hours, and had to be done on foot, but she was reassured that their wildlings were none the worse for wear. It seemed Bran had been fully aware of what he was doing – going so far as to hand the reigns of some of the bonds to Samuel. He’d done it a time or two in the past, that she’d known of. Indeed, he’d done it to Charles, before they’d gone to France all those years ago. Such was his control that Bran could pass pack bonds within his family like they truly were reigns.

She was near home, it was getting close to sunset, when she probed her own bond to Bran. It was something she rarely did – closed as it was. There was a tiny crack, through which he allowed their ability to sense each other’s whereabouts.

A black, oozingly cold finger touched where she was trying to reach.

She came to a stop, a chill settling over her heart.

When Charles had been a boy, the story he had most requested from his big brother had been the story of the Berserker and even Leah had listened with half an ear to the tale he had told. Samuel, had Charles but known it, had been warning his brother with each story, warning them all. This was the monster that Leah herself was tasked with entrapping. The monster who was Bran’s wolf, the monster who was Bran.

Leah would be lying if she had said she hadn’t felt this monster before. She had, in some muted sense. Bran’s control was legend but the monster _was_ his wolf spirit. He was there when Bran was in a temper, he was there when he slept.

But this… this was more than that.

She reached home and, knowing Tag would be out longer than she, started the phone tree with their humans. “Keep everyone indoors,” she told Heather, Tag’s niece, the first on the list. “Lock your windows. Bring out your silver. If you see the Marrok,” she swallowed, “do not approach. Be prepared to shoot him.”

For two hours she waited, feeling twinges from the connection between her and her mate, before finally his voice – his true voice – came loud and clear. _We have bodies for cleaning_. _Bring back-up._

She sunk to the floor where she stood, which happened to be in the laundry room where she had been repetitively, mindlessly balling socks. Her house was spotless and smelled of bleach. She’d been about to start repainting the garage.

Grabbing the phone that she had kept by her all day, she called Tag from the floor, who sounded as relieved as she. “I’ll call Heather, tell everyone to stand down,” she said, after they had agreed who best should accompany Tag, their resident ‘cleaner’.

Leah prepared for bed, though it was not yet six. She felt exhausted, drained, as if she had been doing God-knew-what in the Cabinets and not Bran. Sluggishly, she crawled into her bed, determined to keep her eyes open until he came home to her but an hour passed and she felt sleep overtake her.

She woke, abruptly, hours later and reached out behind her, expecting to find him. Nothing. She sat, listening with her senses to her house. Almost disbelievingly, she went into his room and stared at the empty bed. He hadn’t returned. She could _feel_ him, nearby, but he was not here, not with her, not in their house.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, she wondered what that meant. Why he had not returned to her.

Fruitlessly, she _pushed_ at their mating bond. Nothing happened, as she expected.

Leah took a deep breath and tried to be rational about it. Perhaps he had been hurt. Perhaps _Charles_ had been hurt. Or Asil. Or the Omega, Anna. She had been there too.

Resolutely, she climbed into Bran’s bed, needing the comfort of his scent even if she couldn’t have him. She cuddled his pillow. He would be there in the morning, she decided, closing her eyes.

*

Several weeks later, the Berserker a oft-repressed memory, Anna was in her kitchen, weirdly squirming. She had been ‘dropped off’ by her husband as he came to see Bran, like Leah was some kind of babysitting service. Charles had given her the stink-eye, too, as if Leah might possibly cause some trouble when Leah had been on her very best behavior for weeks.

“What’s wrong?” she sighed, as Anna continued to squirm.

“Nothing.” Anna pushed her teacup around.

Leah wanted to roll her eyes so hard but she stopped herself. “Yes. It looks absolutely like nothing. Is it Charles?” They were in each other’s pockets constantly. She heard more about the ins and outs of this marriage than she did anything else at the moment. Like the Omega and their Second were the pack’s personal soap opera.

Anna cleared her throat. “I have— I have a question.”

“Well get to it, then.”

“Do, um. I got my period?”

Leah looked at her, utterly blankly. “Okay?”

Her lack of response seemed to perk Anna up. “So that’s fine?”

“Fine—oh. You hadn’t, before. _Oh_.” Leah stopped her busywork, her many attempts to keep her hands occupied whilst Anna was in her space. It seemed to help with the Omega’s unconscious _Omega-ing._ Bran claimed Anna was practicing but Leah still found herself wanting to cry continuously around her.

Unless that was just a Leah thing.

She sat down. The female body was an area Leah knew well. An area – oh, good grief – that was her responsibility when it came to the female werewolves Bran Changed and it hadn’t _remotely_ occurred to her she would need to address it with Anna. _That was Isabelle’s job._ “Yes. That’s fine. You will. Not the way you did when you were human,” she amended. “It’s—the moon messes it up.”

The relief on Anna’s face was almost comical. Her eyes dipped to the table with the strange embarrassment Leah often found in Twenty-First Century women about something that was a simple function of the female body. “I just… never had before?”

“No, you wouldn’t. You’re still very young, almost still newly Changed. It takes a while for the body to adjust, we think.” And Anna had been very thin when she arrived. Malnourishment would also affect the natural rhythms of the body. Leah held up a finger with sudden inspiration. “Hold on. I have a binder.”

As she trotted down the hallway to the room that was technically her ‘office’, though she used it significantly less than her hermit-like husband, she heard Anna mutter ‘I knew there should be a book’. She pulled the slim white file she kept on a shelf down and returned to the kitchen.

“Here. It’s got some diagrams and some other information that would probably be helpful. It can’t leave the house,” Leah warned, as the information within that file was highly sensitive. Bran had not been happy she had wanted it written down and they had compromised. “So you’ll have to read it here where I can see you.”

Almost as if she wasn’t hearing anymore, Anna vaguely nodded her thanks and eagerly opened it to the first page. She laughed. “Oh, there an _index_. And, thank goodness, there’s a chapter on mating bonds.”

“Yes,” Leah said drily, thinking once more of her first impressions of Anna, this baby werewolf who knew nothing of their ways. She had been right on that account and she still believed it was part of the appeal for Charles, and Brother Wolf, whose history was almost the bloodiest of them all. “If everything we received was just from our mates, we would be completely without hope.”

*

It would be too much of a stretch to say that Leah took one look at the child and fell head over heels in an unforeseen outpouring of maternal love, but it was a nearer thing than she had ever experienced.

Kara looked mulishly but carefully around Leah’s living area, her father’s nervous hands flexing on her narrow shoulders as he talked with Bran.

She did not like that, Leah thought with a smile. She did not like that her father was controlling her. She met the girl’s eyes, blue to blue, and a shiver of Kara’s dominance made itself known.

Kara dipped her eyes in unconscious submission. For now, Leah was more dominant.

Leah moved slowly, not drawing the attention of the father, who was intensely listening to Bran. When she touched his hands, his head jerked to her. “Don’t do this,” she murmured, quietly, taking his hands from his daughter’s shoulders. Kara perceptibly eased.

She saw – as she would have expected – the father’s flicker of consternation. _His daughter_. In a way, his own, human way, he was her Alpha. He was protecting her, encasing her in his personal space, with his hands, his body. But he was outnumbered here and his eyes flicked from Leah to Bran, down to the head of the girl smaller than he but so much stronger.

Kara stepped to the side but stayed near her father. “I’m fine, Dad,” she said. She had short, roughly cut light brown hair and was thin, terribly thin, but her spine was straight and she had intelligent, clear eyes.

Leah wanted to feed her. She wanted to run with her. She wanted to fold Kara into herself in a way she hadn’t felt since her own children were babies. She looked to Bran, almost desperately, and said in the clearest way possible, with her eyes and her body language and with the press of her own mental voice that he claimed he could not hear, _I want her with us. She is mine now._

Bran heard. He invited the father into his office with his friendly, boyish smile that had fooled so many. “My lovely wife will stay with Kara. She’s safe with her,” he said, and if he sounded surprised only Leah would know it.

“Come. Let’s feed you,” Leah said, no-nonsense, jerking her head towards the kitchen door. She wouldn’t touch her, not yet. “You look like you need at least four good meals.” To start with.

She fed Kara a sandwich, the quickest thing she could make, and then she fried two burger patties and fed her those, slapped between a slightly freezer-burnt burger bun and hamburger sauce. After that she started roasting the chicken that was going to be dinner that night.

She didn’t ask Kara any of the questions she wanted to. Instead, they talked about movies, about music. Somewhat provocatively, as she poured Kara an iced tea, she asked her if she had a boyfriend. “Or girlfriend,” she amended, thinking of Peggy, the new addition to their Aspen Creek family.

Kara flushed bright red and spluttered. “I’m _twelve_ ,” she said. She stuffed a mouthful of potato chips into her mouth.

“Is that too young, these days?” Leah asked, pretending to be confused.

“I think so,” the girl sniffed. “I mean. I guess. I don’t know. I’ve skipped a lot of school.”

Leah asked her about school. Kara affected disinterest. She moved back to safer topics. They were dissecting Taylor Swift’s latest album in great detail, Leah falling strongly on _Out of the Woods_ as the best song, Kara preferring _Shake It Off_ , when Bran’s office door opened.

She touched her hand to the very tip of Kara’s finger. “You’ll be staying with us for a little while,” she told her, absolutely confident in what she was saying. “And you’ll never be alone again.”

*

The first sign that Kara had grown left both of them in tears. To Bran’s horror.

“Good Lord, what’s wrong?” he demanded, his soft feet padding down the hall to find them.

Kara wiped the back of her hand across her nose. She pointed to the door frame, on which Leah had been carefully penciling in Kara’s height for the last few weeks. “I grew!” she said, before unashamedly crying some more.

Less free with her emotions, Leah pulled kitchen towel down from the roll and handed it to her. She blew her own nose discretely, turning her back on Bran to do so. She wiped her eyes. 

“I see,” Bran said, his face softening perceptively. “That’s wonderful news.”

Bran had been the only one who was sure that Kara would grow. Kara hadn’t – her father had explained – since she had been Changed. Leah had been worried that she would be stuck in a girl’s body her whole life. Whilst a lot of werewolves looked young, _ten_ was too young, disturbingly so. 

That precious few millimeters of difference meant the world to Leah. She was vaguely wondering if she could build a frame around the marks on the door frame.

“We should do something to celebrate,” Leah announced. She cupped Kara’s face in her hands, the smile on the girl’s face like the sun rising. “What would you like to do? Anything you want.”

“Pizza. And a movie. In a movie theatre, please,” Kara said swiftly.

This wasn’t a surprise. “Absolutely.” She kissed her forehead impetuously, a loud ‘smack’ of a kiss. “Go wash your face. I’ll see what’s on.”

Kara left the kitchen, sniffing wetly and wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve.

Bran cleared his throat. “Am I invited to this celebration?”

He made it sound as if she regularly excluded him, she thought, when it was usually quite the other way around. Leah picked up her phone and googled the nearest movie theatre. “If you’re free, of course,” she said, casually.

“I think I could move a few things around.” His tone was dry as paper.

She gave him a small smile. “Very funny. Oh, God, I guess I should tell Asil,” she muttered resentfully.

“That would be kind of you.”

Leah was not kind. She pulled a face and sent Asil the shortest of short messages. _She’s grown._ Seconds after, he rung her and she stared at the screen, annoyed. “Why would he – _hello_ ,” she growled, answering because there was always the slightest possibility it was an emergency.

“How much? Are you sure you measured right?”

Quick as a flash, Bran took the cell phone from her fingers. “A solid half-inch,” Bran said, inspecting the mark on the door frame. “Unequivocal, I would say. We’re going out for pizza and a movie.”

Leah threw up her hands as her nice _family_ evening was swiftly ruined by Bran’s desire to _bond_. She stomped upstairs to wash her own face, telling Kara to choose her own movie and that she should try and find something Asil would hate.

She peered into the guest room, which was Kara’s temporary room. She was already on her laptop. “You know, something with lots of kissing.”

Kara nodded, mouse scrolling through the options. She liked tormenting Asil, not because she hated him, but because she was fond of him and enjoyed teasing him. “He would hate that. So would Bran,” she added, thoughtfully.

Leah’s mood improved considerably. “Oh that’s very good.”

*

Leah couldn’t bear to look at the body of Devon any longer, this body that represented so many deaths, so much betrayal, and had been so loved. She slipped upstairs when no one was looking. For a while, she busied herself with tidying her room, uselessly moving things from one place to another, re-ordering clothes in her closet.

Then she sat on her armchair, restless and trying not to be.

Most of her restlessness was because Leah could feel Bran again, coming closer. Until this moment, she had not realized that he could control her awareness of him like he could put down and pick up the pack bonds. She had no such facility. She wished she had the power to make herself disappear.

She felt him come home, take back the pack bonds from Charles, and at least that felt right. That felt _better_. She curled up in the armchair, a magazine on her lap, and waited. He would come to her but first he would see to his people. Their people. She might not like it, but it was right, too.

“You,” Bran said, finally coming into the room when it was nearing midnight, “I can apologize to. I thought you were our traitor.”

“I?” she said, fingers frozen mid-page turn. This was, by no means, what she had expected him to say. An apology for not taking her calls. For disappearing. For knowing something was wrong and _not talking to her_. For leaving her alone, first to chase that coyote over Europe, to leaving her with his son and his wife in _their_ home, _Leah’s_ space.

Then of course it dawned on her what he meant. She set the magazine aside. “That’s why you left. If I had betrayed you, betrayed the pack, you’d have had to kill me.”

He nodded. “I can’t do that. You know why. So I left it to Charles.” He apologized again. “I am sorry.”

She raised her eyebrows as hurt weighed down her heart. She tried for lightness, an attempt to mask her feelings. “Whatever for? I’m flattered that you thought that I was our traitor.” She forced a smile. “It would take a lot of ingenuity and ability to be this close to you and betray you.”

“I should have known better,” Bran said, earnest as he ever was when he apologized. He looked grey with tiredness, and thin, as if he hadn’t been eating or had perhaps drained himself in some magical way. “You have always been driven by the good of the pack.”

She shrugged. “I never suspected Sage. That’s the nature of traitors, isn’t it?”

Leah uncurled from her chair and strolled toward him, mastering an unaffected façade. He was home. That was what mattered. There had been dark moments when she thought he might not return. “I accept your apologies—though I don’t need them.” Not true. She could see her own lie reflected on his face. No matter. “You look tired. Come to bed.”

Bran nodded, his face still doubtful. She watched him undress, revealing the sharp bones of his spine, his shoulders tense with unhappiness. She pressed herself to his back, digging her thumbs into muscles she knew would be knots of tension. She kissed his back, just to the left of one of his scars.

“Come to bed,” she whispered, again. 

*

The clear-up, the funerals, the planning of the barbeque social, were all excellent distractions from the chaos within her in the days after Bran returned. She saw little of him, of course. He had fallen asleep the moment he had climbed into her bed and she had lain next to him for a long time, thinking of forgiveness, of all the ways they had hurt each other over the years before sleep finally took her.

When she had awoken, he had been gone, the space beside her barely warm from his body. He would spend the next few days and quite a few nights secreted away in his office to begin the job of unravelling Sage’s web.

When there were gaps between her own chores, the continuing of life in the pack, Leah took herself into their wildling territory with Tag at her side. They cleared Devon’s den, Jericho’s cabin and his cave. They checked on the remains of Hester’s and Jonesy’s home, raking through the dirt for any fae artefacts that they might have missed. Tag ignored her tears on her face, as he had ignored them many times before. It was the way she wanted it.

She tried not to be alone and, if that meant spending time with Anna, planning the barbeque social, then so be it. 

When she was alone her thoughts plagued her. Her past with Bran coming back to haunt her. She tried all the usual things – going for a run, taking herself off on long, exhausting hikes and frequently found herself back in front of her old house.

“I take it you are thinking of better days when you come here.”

Leah sat forward, peering behind the tree at the man who had crept up on her. She smothered her annoyance at this, this tendency of all the men in her life to creep around with such silence, and said with her usual acid, “So she did get you out, then.” It had been she who had suggested Kara might be best placed to force the Moor from his den. She had been right.

It gave her little joy.

He nodded and, slowly, he approached her. He gestured to the ground. “May I?”

Asil sat without appreciably waiting for her response.

Leah was torn. She found herself in the unusual position of _wanting_ to talk to Asil. She wanted to say so many things to him, things she could not say to her husband in his current mindset. She knew Asil had tortured Sage for the information she had. She knew this and… she was sad about it. She _hated_ Sage, her teeth hurt with the stress of her betrayal, her desire to seek revenge. But she also mourned the woman she had thought had been her friend.

It was not a conundrum Leah had faced before. She was rarely conflicted. At least, about anyone other than Bran. 

“You and I have something in common,” Asil said, unerringly picking up on the direction of Leah’s thoughts.

They may have loved, in their own, deeply flawed ways, the same woman who had betrayed them all.

Leah raked her fingers through the grass at her feet. “If it’s any consolation, I do think she actually felt something for you,” she said, unwillingly. She had been privy to enough details to know that. No woman could fake the kind of glow that Sage had worn the first time Asil had _finally_ taken her to bed, after months and months of flirtation, of some kind of reluctant dance between them. 

“I don’t need consoling,” Asil growled but it was half-hearted at best.

They sat some more, in silence, staring at the back of what had been Leah’s house. After a while, Leah remembered his question. “Maybe not better days. Simpler. It was a smaller world,” she murmured. A smaller world full of hard work, of routines. Of survival. Little time to question decisions made.

Asil nodded. His hair was a touch too long now, falling into his face. Sage would have teased him, offered to cut his hair for him in a way that would have suggested she meant more than a hair-cut and Asil would have flushed uncomfortably at the offer. “You said this was your house?” he asked, harking back to a long-ago conversation. “Before you were mated?”

Leah shook her head. “No. We were mated. We just lived apart. We were not…” She waved a hand, unsure why she was explaining all this history to him. But what did it matter. He could ask anyone. Sam. Charles. Tag. They had all been there. But not Devon. Nor Jericho. Hester. They were gone now. “We were not together. Like that.”

Asil’s handsome face crumpled with an intense frown. He folded his hands on his lap. “I didn’t think that was possible.”

“Bran didn’t want— _I_ didn’t want, actually. I’d had enough of werewolf men by that point.” She cast him a look. “Believe it or not.”

“Oh, no. I can readily believe that. I know what we’re like, after all.” His face smoothed with his usual dry humor. “So this is how Bran convinced you? With a story of a platonic mating?”

This was the problem with old werewolves. Everything they said sounded like they were patronizing her. It was _hardly_ like she was a baby. “It wasn’t a _story_. We were mated for years before anything like that happened.”

Asil’s eyebrows lifted, as if he was surprised. “I see. How unusual.”

Leah was too tired, too drained, for these kinds of conversations. “Have you been up to the house? He would wish to see you.” For more than just to check on him. She knew Bran had plans in place which he would want to discuss with Asil. Asil who had knowledge of witches and a cunning mind.

They needed all the cunning minds they could get.

“Not yet.” The Moor stood, brushing down his pants and then offered her his hand. “Let me escort you back to your home, Mrs. Cornick.”

*

Leah was not musical but she could appreciate _good_ music. When Tag pulled out his bagpipes – _not_ part of the meticulous schedule that she and Anna had agreed with everyone – she winced, expecting the worst. At first, she didn’t immediately recognize the song and then it clicked. _The Wild Hunt._ Beside her, Peggy started to twitch. 

That twitch was the first sign of what would become. Kara, the youngest, the most uncontrolled, was the first to go and where she went, the other newly Changed followed. Then the rest of the pack until it was just Anna and Leah staring, indignantly, at the piles of clothing, the instruments yet to be played, the cornucopia of food yet to be eaten.

“I vote we turn the sprinklers on,” Anna announced, the streak of mischief Leah had often seen her coming to the fore.

Leah grinned in appreciation. Yes. Wet clothes would be fair retribution for the ruination of their not inconsiderable efforts. “Let’s put the instruments inside first.”

They did so and then, with alacrity, Leah turned on the sprinklers and they watched, both snacking on chicken wings and sipping from bottles of beer, as the pack’s clothing grew dark and sodden.

“ _Next_ time,” Anna murmured, finishing off her beer and then reaching for another, “we should get Tag to plan it.”

She nodded. “Reasonable.”

After they had eaten their fill, and not a single member of the Aspen Creek pack had reappeared, Anna drove home and Leah put all the leftovers into the refrigerator. She would prepare some extravagant hampers for the wildlings, she decided. Perhaps Bran would be in the mood for distributing them with her. Otherwise, given her new détente with the Moor, maybe he could be convinced to accompany her.

She heard the office door open and Charles peered with confusion into the kitchen whilst she was wiping down surfaces. She explained what had happened and in retelling found it even more amusing. Charles, too. They happened to be looking at each other when they smiled and Leah reflected that it was _possible_ they had done so before but she couldn’t recall it.

“I have never told you thank you,” he said.

Her eyebrows raised – though she knew very well what he was talking about. Gratitude from either of Bran’s sons was rare. It was only fair that she relish it.

“If you had not come back,” he continued, “the skinwalker would have killed me.”

Leah folded up the wet cloth and hung it over the faucet to dry. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “You weren’t dead when we got there. If there is one thing that I have learned over the time I’ve spent here with your father, it is that it doesn’t do to underestimate you.”

Charles inclined his head slightly. “Thank you,” he said, because he had been brought up well, “for coming back to help when I needed you.”

She considered it a moment. “I didn’t do it for you.” She opened a drawer and took out a clean dish towel and set it out beside the sink. With her back to him, she said what she, and he, had known for a very long time, “I do not like you. I have never liked you – and it is not your fault. He loves you. And he does not love me.”

It felt good to say the words out loud. Cathartic. She made excuses for why she didn’t like Charles. He was frightening. He was sullen. But when it came down to it – Bran loved him. Oh, he would sacrifice Charles for his cause. He would sacrifice all of them. But he loved him.

“What,” Charles said carefully as she turned to look at him once more, “would be different if he loved you?”

Leah glared, all sense of camaraderie disappearing in an instant. She had forgotten how much she loathed it when her husband’s sons involved themselves in her marriage and she had only herself to blame. Talking of _love_ , like a fool. “You cryptic son of a bitch,” she muttered.

Charles flinched slightly, regret suffusing his face. He looked away from her. “Do you know where Anna is?”

“She left,” Leah said coolly. “I presume she went home.”

Charles took his leave of her, nodding formally.

Leah finished up in the kitchen, annoyed. What would be different? he asked, the boy who had waited two centuries for the love of his life. What the hell did he know?

But the question bothered her. What would be different? She asked herself, over and over again, as she tidied up the living room, picking up cushions and rearranging blankets, tidying the bar. And realized, apart from the ephemeral knowledge that her mate loved her back, presumably nothing. Bran loving her wouldn’t change the fundamental tenants of their relationship. It wouldn’t change _him_. Nor would it change her. She would still be a jealous bitch. There was no changing that.

Feet moving almost without her direction, she found her way to his office. The door was slightly ajar and she saw a sliver of him first, his head in his hands at his desk, before he sensed her. He looked up and she pushed the door open with a finger.

“If you’ve come to give me grief, I would ask that you withhold it for a few more days,” he said drily, steepling his fingers.

For a moment, Leah didn’t know what he meant. “Oh, I never expected you to join the social,” she replied, evidently surprising him. “You haven’t slept more than an hour or two in two weeks.” Instead he had paced his room, the house, the back yard. Whilst she had been grieving the woman she had thought was her friend, Bran had been blindsided by betrayal and by the greater threat he had not seen. “And you’re angry. Not at our people. But at yourself.”

A combination that Bran knew better than to visit on an innocent pack gathering.

Softly, carefully, she walked around his desk. Her mate stared up at her and for the first time in a long, long time, she looked at her husband, properly. Not in the superficial, day to day sense. He was tired, of course. But his eyes – eyes she thought were the most beautiful mix of brown and green, the leaves of late summer merging into fall – were full of anguish.

Leah loved him. She also cared for him in a way few people did. She would lay down her life for him, even if he didn’t deserve it. She brushed his hair away from his forehead and he reached up to catch her hand, pulled it to his lips. “I am sorry,” he murmured, closing his eyes briefly.

“I know.” She curled her hand around his cheek. “I said I forgave you.”

“Do you though? I hurt you.”

He had. He did. She drew in a deep breath, let it out in an even deeper sigh. “It’s a low point,” she admitted.

Bran laughed into her hand and with a slight tug, drew her down onto his lap, purposefully gentle, given the rage she knew was within him. “A low point, indeed.”

“We’ve had a few,” Leah said, looping her arms about his neck. This was an unusually affectionate position. He must feel very sorry. She brushed her nose against the short hairs of his sideburns, then gave in and did what her wolf wanted and rubbed her cheek against his. “Some highs, too.”

Bran’s arms tightened around her. His fingers twined in the loose waves of her hair. “That’s true. It does feel, perhaps it’s just me, that the last few years have been particularly trying.”

“Yes.” This was an honest conversation, for them. They didn’t speak of their marriage in such general terms. The last few years had certainly been trying, as he put it.

She thought of Charles’s words, the ones that had spurred her on to see him, felt the prickle of the awkwardness of her question before the words tumbled like they always did from her mouth. “It wouldn’t be any different, would it, if you loved me? Not really.”

Bran’s body tensed momentarily. She was glad, curled around each other like they were, that she could not see his face. “I— no, it would not be different.” He snorted a breath into her hair. “Not because of whatever you are thinking, however.” 

Leah pulled her head back to look at him, knowing she had a ridiculous expression of confusion on her face. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t look at me like that. You must know what I am trying to say here.” Bran scratched the top of his nose, avoided looking at her, instead fixed his gaze on the top drawer of his desk. “We’ve been together for decades. And it feels different, than the last time. It’s why I didn’t—despite everyone’s belief in my infallibility, I don’t _always_ know what I’m doing, current circumstances are a certainly testament to that.”

“Yes, now is precisely the time to bring up the _last time_ ,” Leah said darkly, thumping his arm ineffectually. Only Bran would bring up his _previous_ mate when he was confessing – she thought – his love for her.

“You make a good point.”

“So you do?” _Love me._ She could not say the words but Bran nodded. Warmth spread through her chest. Shocking warmth, in fact. She felt it in her fingers and toes. “When did you decide this?”

“Around the time I was carefully shredding the bedding in my hotel room,” Bran sighed, stroking her hair. “With the benefit of hindsight, it’s a manifestly ridiculous idea that we could be together for all this time and I could _make_ myself feel nothing. I’m almost embarrassed.”

Curiously, he did look embarrassed. Sheepish. As if she might scold him for the error of his ways.

“Were you going to tell me?” she asked suspiciously.

“Yes. Probably tonight, actually.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Oh, did I spoil the big reveal?”

Bran cleared his throat and reached around to one of his drawers. He tugged it open and scrambled around out of her eyesight. She didn’t mind. She just watched his face, the pink cheeks of his embarrassment, relishing this moment. It was almost surreal. “Here, hold this,” he said, handing her something.

It was her wolf. The little wooden carving she had given him, oh, so very long ago. It was smooth and darkened with age and the oils from being well handled. Delighted, she turned it over, admiring it. “You kept it. All this time.” It was very sentimental of him.

“Not only did I keep it…” With little-boy-pride, Bran presented her with a rough-hewn figure of his own. A wolf, this time curled around as if sleeping, nose tucked in tail.

Her lips parted. “Did _you_ do this?”

“All my own work. With a little help from YouTube.”

She beamed at him so hard her cheeks hurt. She felt suffused with joy. “It’s lovely.”

“It’s my apology gift.”

Leah laughed. She held the two figures in her hands. They were of a size and clearly a matching pair. Her Bran and his Leah. With time, the fresh wood of her wolf would age like his had. “I can see that. I love it,” she murmured, clutching them both to her chest.

She didn’t think it needed saying, as she had been glaringly obvious with her feelings for a very long time, but she had never said it to him before. “I love you,” she said, finding the words curiously sweet.

Bran smiled back at her. _As I love you._ Then, because theirs was a mating of practicalities, he kissed her, quickly, “But this won’t make it easier,” he said.

Leah considered the two wooden figures. “No,” she agreed. A marriage was work. Love didn’t make it less so.

But it would help.

-END-

**Author's Note:**

> I used quite a few actual excerpts from PB's books to flesh out some of the more 'recent' storylines. I feel I should acknowledge this. 
> 
> I am, as ever, deeply sorry for the historical inadequacies. WikiPedia only takes you so far.


End file.
